Negotiators from the United States and Russia have agreed the outline of a new nuclear arms pact, Russia's Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified diplomatic source as saying on Friday. "The provisions of a new START agreement are agreed and there will be an official announcement in the near future," the source was quoted as saying.
The world's two largest nuclear powers have been trying to find a replacement for the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-I), the biggest pact to cut nuclear weapons in history. A senior US official said in Washington on Thursday that US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev could reach an agreement in principle in Copenhagen on Friday, leaving negotiators to finalise a deal later.
-- Announcement on new START treaty soon
-- Breakthrough before Obama, Medvedev meeting
The two leaders will meet in the Danish capital on the sidelines of a global climate change conference. Russia called on Thursday for simpler verification procedures for planned cuts in nuclear weapons arsenals, while Washington insisted it wanted a deal that worked for both former Cold War foes. The US official said there was little chance the leaders would be ready to sign a finished accord in Copenhagen.
"But if the presidents are able to come to terms on the remaining verification issues, it might be possible to reach an agreement in principle which will still require the negotiating teams to finalise," the official said. The White House has said "good progress" was being made in US-Russian negotiations in Geneva despite signs of tension. "It's high time to get rid of excessive suspiciousness," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow on Thursday.
Talks on a replacement for START-I had stumbled in recent weeks, but both sides had said they expected an agreement soon. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Thursday the discussions were making good headway but the United States was not interested in doing a deal for its own sake. "We want something that works for both sides. We're going to work on this agreement until we get it right ... it doesn't make sense to get something just for the sake of getting it if it doesn't work for both sides," he said.
Obama and Medvedev had wanted a new treaty by December 5, but that deadline passed and the old accord was extended indefinitely while negotiators in Geneva tried to forge a new pact. Tensions came to the surface on Thursday. "In the last couple of days we have noticed some slowing down in the position of US negotiators in Geneva," Lavrov said. "They explain this by the need to receive additional instructions. But our team is ready for work."
Gibbs denied Washington was dragging its feet. Both sides say finding a replacement to the START-I treaty would help "reset" relations between Moscow and Washington that had sunk to a post-Cold War low in recent years. Negotiations in Switzerland have been proceeding under unusually tight secrecy and neither side has given a clear explanation for the delay in finding a deal.
The START-I treaty, signed in July 1991 by US President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, took nearly a decade to achieve but resulted in both Russia and the United States more than halving their nuclear arsenals. Obama and Medvedev said at a Moscow summit in July they wanted a new treaty that would reduce operationally deployed nuclear warheads to 1,500 to 1,675, a cut of about a third from current levels.
They also agreed that strategic delivery systems - the missiles, bombers and submarines that launch nuclear warheads - should be limited to between 500 and 1,100 units. Lavrov said he hoped the cuts in the new treaty would be as drastic as possible but added that verification procedures, which were extremely strict under START-1, should be made "less complicated and less costly." Precise figures on deployed nuclear weapons are secret, but the US-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimated at the start of 2009 that the United States had about 2,200 operationally deployed nuclear warheads and Russia about 2,790.
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