Marine Corps News, news from Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Russian diplomat criticizes U.S. arms control

MOSCOW — A senior Russian diplomat harshly criticized the U.S. stance in arms control talks Friday, saying it could further erode mutual trust and undermine global stability.

The United States and Russia have begun talks on a successor deal to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty which expires in December 2009, but a cold spell in Russia-U.S. relations has stymied talks.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that Russian and U.S. negotiators have failed to agree on the basic approach as to which weapons should be counted under the new deal.

Russia wants to count missiles, bombers and submarines along with nuclear warheads fitted to them, as was done in the START I treaty, while the United States agrees only to count nuclear warheads, Ryabkov said.

“The implementation of the approach proposed by the American side can strip our bilateral relations of a key element — predictability in arms control — and badly destabilize the strategic situation,” Ryabkov said in a statement.

U.S. officials argued that missiles, bombers and submarines mustn’t be subject to a nuclear arms control deal because they can also carry conventional weapons.

Ryabkov strongly objected to that, saying when a missile is launched, the target country doesn’t know whether it carries a conventional or a nuclear warhead until it lands. That assumption was the basis for the START I treaty, he said.

The insistence by President George W. Bush’s administration on counting only “operationally deployed” nuclear warheads — meaning those attached to missiles — would “dilute the new agreement and create opportunities for a covert buildup of strategic weapons,” Ryabkov said.

Ryabkov spoke after a round of arms control talks earlier this week with a U.S. delegation led by John Rood, the State Department’s top arms control official.

Rood told reporters that he got an impression the Russians were waiting to size up Barack Obama’s administration before Moscow advances its position on disputed arms issues.

U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, in Moscow to gauge Russia’s stance on arms control, said the issue of counting rules was “worthy of serious discussions.”

“I would not preclude any subject from being part of START negotiations,” he said at a news conference.

START I was signed by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush, obligating each country to cut its nuclear warhead stocks by at least one-quarter to about 6,000. Another arms control deal — the so-called Treaty of Moscow — was signed in 2002 and called for cutting each country’s nuclear arsenal further to 1,700-2,200 warheads by 2012. The document was closely based on START I rules and its verification procedures.

Efforts to negotiate a successor pact to the START I have been hurt by a strain in bilateral ties over the U.S. missile defense plans and Russia’s war with Georgia in August.

Russian officials have voiced hope that ties could improve under the new U.S. administration.

Col.-Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, the chief of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces, said the military could cut some prospective weapons programs if Obama’s administration reverses course on putting missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“Several expensive programs will simply become unnecessary for us,” Solovtsov said, according to the Interfax news agency.