Global Security Newswire

U.S. and Russian diplomats have little chance of agreeing on a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty before the 1991 pact expires at the end of this week, the New York Times reported yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 1).

U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed in July to cut their nations' respective deployed strategic nuclear arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 warheads, down from the 2,200-weapon limit the states are required to meet by 2012 under another treaty. The leaders also pledged to restrict strategic delivery vehicles on each side to between 500 and 1,100.

Despite "tense, intense and substantive" negotiations taking place "practically around the clock," according to one Russian lawmaker, the sides remain notably divided over arrangements for verifying compliance with the new agreement.

Russian military officials and foreign policy planners have pushed to restrain monitoring terms they said were too invasive under the 1991 treaty.

“Russia is not interested in having the same scope of verification procedures that were in the earlier treaty. There is this conclusion that these measures were too much, and too extensive,” said Anton Khlopkov, head of the Moscow-based Center for Energy and Security Studies.

One White House official said a final deal is "not going to happen" by next week, when Obama is expected to receive the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. “We are working this hard, but it will only get done if it is a good agreement that advances our national interests,” the source said.

Washington and Moscow have agreed to limit each side to less than 800 nuclear-weapon delivery systems, another U.S. official said.

“There’s been a huge amount of progress just in the last week,” but “there’s going to have to be political heavy lifting in the next few days,” the official added (Baker/Levy, New York Times, Dec. 2).

"The (new) agreement will not be signed on Saturday, but there is a possibility that it could be signed as early as mid-December," RIA Novosti quoted Alexei Arbatov, head of the Center for International Security Studies in Moscow, as saying.

"It is not a tragedy that the new treaty is not signed by Dec. 5. The tragedy, or a hard blow, to put it mildly, would be if the new treaty is not signed by May next year," when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Review conference is scheduled, Arbatov said (see GSN, July 21).

"If the (new START) treaty is not signed by then, the conference will be a failure ... and we might as well forget about a new nonproliferation regime, with all foreseeable consequences," he said (RIA Novosti, Dec. 3).