Spirit without a letter

Russia and the United States will continue negotiations on nuclear weapons reduction

Russia and the United States could theoretically sign a new Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START) by December 10. On this day, American President Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. The signing of a Russian-American treaty would be a good arrangement for a solemn ceremony, confirming the correctness of the decision of the Nobel Committee. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently said that he does not rule out such a scenario. Journalists asked him if the rumors were true that in December Obama, before heading to Oslo, would allegedly “make an unscheduled trip to Prague to sign the START Treaty with President Medvedev.” But Mr. Gibbs did not confirm these rumors: “If this were so, then somewhere there would already be an advance group of our employees preparing such a visit. But she’s not there.”

Work on the New START treaty is going hard. The old document expired last Saturday, December 5, and the new one is not yet ready. US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly recently admitted that he “hopes to have a draft document ready by the end of December,” and Obama’s national security adviser, General James Jones, believes that the text can be agreed upon by the two presidents in Copenhagen, where the UN summit on climate change. The American president will arrive there at the end of either this or next week. The participation of the Russian president has not yet been confirmed.

However, it was not possible to prepare a new document on time. On Friday, December 4, half a day before the expiration of the previous agreement, Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama released a joint statement. “Recognizing our mutual desire to maintain strategic stability between the Russian Federation and the United States of America, we state our fundamental commitment to continue to cooperate in the spirit of the START Treaty after its expiration, as well as our firm commitment to ensure the early entry into force of a new strategic weapons treaty ", the document says. On the same day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on this topic with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Brussels, where the Russia-NATO Council met. However, at the final press conference, he was extremely brief: “I will not comment on the situation around strategic offensive arms in detail, since these details are dealt with by the delegations. They are working under the direction of the two presidents to prepare a treaty as quickly as possible. I hope that this will happen in the not too distant future.”

Medvedev and Obama, during the Moscow summit in July of this year, promised to do everything possible to sign a new treaty. Even earlier - in April - the American leader, in his speech in Prague, spoke in the same spirit that former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev once proposed to gradually achieve the elimination of atomic weapons. “As the only nuclear power to use nuclear weapons (against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 - Ed .), the United States, with a moral responsibility, must act. We cannot succeed alone, but we can lead the fight to achieve success. So today I declare with clarity and conviction America's commitment to achieving peace and security without nuclear weapons."

The first step on this path is to be the signing of a new Russian-American START treaty. Groups of experts are still working on it behind closed doors in Geneva. The Russian delegation is headed by the Director of the Foreign Ministry's Department for Security and Disarmament Affairs Anatoly Antonov, and the American delegation by Deputy Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller. “We can reach the final text of the agreement by December,” Medvedev noted on November 15 after a meeting with Obama in Singapore.

But during the preparation of the new document, differences emerged regarding confidence-building measures and control over the arsenal of nuclear weapons. According to Ian Kelly, the Americans want to “preserve the type of verification and monitoring mechanisms that were at the core” of the previous treaty. Russia insists on improving them. For example, American inspectors did not want to leave the Russian city of Votkinsk in Udmurtia, where they had been stationed for almost 20 years. There they checked the work of the Votkinsk Machine-Building Plant, where the new generation Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missiles, RS-24 missiles with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles and the latest Bulava sea-based strategic missiles, still undergoing testing, are produced. But due to the expiration of the previous START Treaty, the Americans nevertheless left the plant - the Russian side has now insisted on this. “The new START Treaty proposes a different, less expensive mechanism for monitoring its compliance, instead of the current complex and multi-layered verification procedure,” a Russian diplomat, who wished to remain anonymous, explained to reporters in Moscow.

In addition, the specific size of future nuclear arsenals has not yet been determined. So far, only approximate limits of reductions, agreed upon back in July, are known: in the number of strategic delivery vehicles - up to 500-1100 units, in the number of nuclear warheads - up to 1500-1675 units. However, the contract should contain more specific figures.

According to Ian Kelly, the Russian and US delegations in Geneva, in addition to the START Treaty itself, are also working on a “binding political agreement.” It could be useful in the event that the parties fail to agree on the essence of the new document and some kind of agreement is needed for the transition period. Through this document, as the American diplomat explained, it would be possible to “preserve some, although not all, existing control measures” for the period until the new treaty is signed by the presidents and ratified by the parliaments of the two countries.

The presidents' interest in the early conclusion of a new START Treaty is also understandable politically. Both leaders can go down in the history of nuclear disarmament, as the then US and USSR Presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev did after signing the START Treaty in Moscow on July 31, 1991. Three years later, after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the treaty was ratified. This was a breakthrough in such a complex issue as nuclear arms control and reduction. The signing of a new document would also mean that a reset of Russian-American relations is taking place not only in words.

Retired Colonel General Viktor Esin, who led a group of Soviet military advisers at disarmament negotiations in the 1980s, reminded Vremya Novostey that at that time the Americans had more warheads than there were strategic targets on the territory of the Soviet Union: “They were planning to launch nuclear attacks on city party committees in cities with a population of less than 50 thousand people. These cities had no strategic significance." Our interlocutor said that “mutual distrust was so strong that multi-day discussions arose on every, even trivial issue”: “It was an almost 500-page tome, in which every comma, quotation marks or footnotes were studied under a magnifying glass, said many times, before than the contract was signed. But it couldn’t be otherwise.”

Petr ISKENDEROV, Boris KAIMAKOV