U.S., Russia close to arms treaty
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The United States and Russia are close to an agreement on a new nuclear arms treaty, presidents Obama and Dmitry Medvedev said this morning.
The new deal would replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START I, that expired Dec. 5.
Obama met privately with Medvedev in Copenhagen, where both were attending the climate change talks. The leaders met briefly with reporters but took no questions.
Our main focus today was the START treaty -- the new START treaty that we have been negotiating,” Obama said. “We’ve been making excellent progress. We are quite close to an agreement. And I’m confident that it will be completed in a timely fashion.”
Medvedev was equally upbeat.
“Our positions are very close and almost all the issues that we’ve been discussing for the last month are almost closed. And there are certain technical details which we can encounter many agreements which require further work. I hope that we will be able to do it in a quite brief period of time,” he said.
The treaty requires each country to eliminate one-quarter of the nuclear warheads to about 6,000. At their July summit in Moscow, Obama and Medvedev agreed to cut the number of nuclear warheads on each side to between 1,500 and 1,675 within seven years. They also instructed their negotiators to finish their work before the treaty expired Dec. 5.
-- Michael Muskal
