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U.S.-Russian negotiators ready to kick off START III |
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April 15, 2000
GENEVA, APR 14 (AP) - Top U.S. arms negotiators are ready to kick off a new round of talks for strategic arms cuts when they meet Russian counterparts here next week, officials said Friday.
Teams from both countries have already met at least five times since last summer to lay the groundwork for START III, but Moscow's long-delayed ratification of START II today clears the way for a new beginning, said U.S. officials.
The negotiations likely will be overshadowed by the sensitive issue of whether Russia will go along with U.S. demands to revise the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
The talks, under an agreement reached between President Bill Clinton and former Russian President Boris Yeltsin last June, have two purposes - to revive the deep cuts in each side's nuclear arsenals and to work out differences over the ABM treaty.
Washington's desire to reopen the ABM treaty so it can develop a limited nuclear defense has met strenuous opposition from the Kremlin as well as China and other countries. They maintain it is a crucial cornerstone on which other nuclear treaties depend.
The United States says it needs a limited missile defense to ward off attacks of "tens" of missiles from rogue nations and insists it poses no threat to Russia, which still has the capacity to fire thousands of missiles.
But Moscow says the system could just as well be used against Russian rockets and that its deployment would upset the strategic balance and launch a new arms race.
The theory behind the tight limits on anti-missile defense under the treaty is that a nation is less likely to use nuclear weapons if it knows it cannot defend against atomic attack from the other side.
Conducting the two days of talks starting Monday will be Yuri Kapralov, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's arms control department, and John Holum, the Clinton administration's key disarmament specialist.
The Duma action provides the basis of a fresh beginning in the talks, which so far have yielded no signs of progress.
START II, which would halve U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals to 3,000-3,500 warheads each, was signed in 1993 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1996.
The Clinton administration has proposed that START III set a ceiling for both Russia and the United States of 2,000 to 2,500 warheads. Russia wants even deeper cuts, possibly to 1,500 strategic warheads on each side.
Even as the talks have continued, Russia has maintained it is not renegotiating the ABM.
If Russia continues to refuse ABM modifications, the Clinton administration has said it will decide in July whether to withdraw from the treaty and begin work on the missile defense.
That would precipitate an automatic Russian withdrawal from the START I and START II treaties, Russian officials have said.
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