By RIA Novosti
Moscow : A treaty to replace a major nuclear arms reduction agreement between Russia and the US must set lower ceilings for nuclear arsenals and limit the development of new nuclear weapons, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday.
“We insist that any document replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-I) should set lower ceilings, not only for the number of nuclear warheads but also for their delivery vehicles,” Sergei Lavrov said on his way back from Tuesday’s Middle East peace conference in the US.
The START-I treaty was signed by the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union on July 31, 1991, five months before the Soviet Union collapsed, and remains in force for the U S, Russia, and three other former Soviet states.
The three former Soviet republics, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, have since disposed of all their nuclear weapons or transferred them to Russia, and the US and Russia have reduced the number of delivery vehicles to 1,600, with no more than 6,000 warheads.
The current treaty is set to expire on Dec 5, 2009.
The START-I treaty was followed by START-II, which banned the use of multiple independent re-entry vehicles (MIRV) but was never enforced. It was later bypassed by the Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions (SORT), signed on May 24, 2002 by Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush in Moscow.
SORT, which expires on Dec 31, 2012, limited both countries’ nuclear arsenals to 1,700-2,200 warheads each. The treaty has been largely criticized for lack of verification provisions and for not explicitly prohibiting the re-deployment of stored warheads.
“The Moscow agreement (SORT) deals only with deployed nuclear warheads, but if they are simply stored, you can, basically, have as many of them as you want,” Lavrov said.
He also said the new treaty should be legally binding on, and signed by, all nuclear powers, not only Russia and the US.
“We insist on legally binding nature of any new agreement, and it should include not only confidence-building measures but should also be a step forward toward further reduction of nuclear arsenals,” the minister said.
“If we do not follow this course of action, we may find it difficult to take the next step – to turn the nuclear disarmament and nuclear weapons reduction into a multilateral process by involving other nuclear powers,” Lavrov said.
Russia and the US have already called on all countries to join the bilateral Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that banned nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 km.