COPENHAGEN—The United States and Russia are close, but still not quite there, on an agreement on a new arms control treaty that will reduce their strategic nuclear arsenals by at least one quarter,President Obama and Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev said Friday.
Meeting on the outskirts of the globalclimate change conference here, the two men said that they have resolved almost all of the remaining difficulties and plan to finalize a pact soon. “I’m confident we will conclude this agreement in a timely fashion,” Mr. Obama said, seated next to Mr. Medvedev for a photo op after the hour-long meeting.
Obama administration officials had said prior to coming to Copenhagen that they did not expect to conclude the pact to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991, known as Start, until after this trip and probably not until early next year.
Start expired on Dec. 5; the two countries have been operating on an interim agreement since. The new version of Start would require each side to reduce deployed strategic nuclear warheads to roughly 1,600, down from 2,200, administration officials said. It would also force each side to reduce its strategic bombers and land and sea-based missiles to below 800, down from the old limit of 1,600. The remaining issues to be resolved center on verification, American officials said.
If the lingering differences can be addressed, the Obama administration hopes to build on the trust established over the past eight months and plunge right back into talks for a broader agreement to reduce the number of deployed strategic warheads even further, perhaps to about 1,000 for each country, a level considered the lowest the two would go without bringing in China, Britain, France and other nuclear powers.
That agreement is expected to be far more difficult to achieve, nuclear experts said.
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