Russia and US to sign new treaty on nuclear arms cuts

THE UNITED States and Russia are poised to sign a new nuclear arms reduction treaty, but clashed yesterday over Moscow’s plans to finally launch a controversial nuclear reactor in Iran.

Russian and US negotiators have spent almost a year hammering out a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start), which expired in December, but talks have been complicated by Moscow’s fears over US plans to create a missile defence system in central Europe.

“We are making substantial progress on the new Start treaty, that’s the word from our negotiators in Geneva,” US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said after meeting Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow. “And the results of the latest negotiation rounds lead us to believe we’ll be reaching a final agreement soon.”

Mr Lavrov, who has said that a deal could be ready to sign by early April, added: “We are at the end of the final straight, and we hope that very soon the negotiators will announce that their work has been completed.”

US president Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, agreed last July to cut their countries’ nuclear arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 warheads. The US currently has some 2,200 nuclear warheads, and Russia is believed to have around 3,000.

Earlier this week, speaker of the Russian parliament Boris Gryzlov, an ally of prime minister Vladimir Putin, said the chamber might not ratify the new treaty unless it contained provisions on a missile defence system that Washington wants to establish in central Europe to counter the perceived threat of missile attack from Iran.

Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria have offered to host parts of the system, raising Russian fears over its security. Mr Obama scrapped an earlier plan to build a huge radar in the Czech Republic and to deploy interceptor missiles in Poland, but has supported efforts to create a different system to shoot down any short- and medium-range rockets fired from Iran.

Washington wants Russian help in pressing Iran to allay international fears that its nuclear programme will not be used to make weapons. Tehran insists that it only seeks to produce nuclear power, and wants Moscow to finally launch the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant.

“We continue work on developing atomic energy capacity both at home and abroad,” Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin said yesterday. “The start-up of the first reactor of the Bushehr atomic power station is planned for this summer.”

Ms Clinton immediately condemned the idea of launching Bushehr, which has been subject to long delays in recent years that Moscow has blamed on technical issues, but which many Iranians see as politically motivated.

“If it reassures the world, or if its behaviour is changed because of international sanctions, then they can pursue peaceful, civil nuclear power,” Ms Clinton said of Iran. “In the absence of those reassurances, we think it would be premature to go forward with any project at this time, because we want to send an unequivocal message to the Iranians.”