U.S. and Russia Begin Arms Talks With a December Deadline

Source: NYT

By ELLEN BARRY
Published: May 19, 2009

MOSCOW — After months of prelude, Russian and American teams sat down in Moscow on Tuesday to begin renegotiating the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or Start, a key plank in the promised “reset” of relations between the countries.

The negotiators face a tight timeline if they are to replace the old agreement, which runs more than 700 pages, before it expires on Dec. 5. In recent days, top Russian officials have suggested that success at renegotiating Start is contingent on changes to an American plan for a missile defense system, a difficult negotiation in its own right ...

Basic outlines of an accord have already emerged. A short-term agreement signed in 2002 by President George W. Bush and Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia at the time, requires each country to reduce its arsenal to fewer than 2,200 deployed warheads by 2012; the new agreement is likely to lower the ceiling to 1,500 apiece or fewer.

Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, Washington’s chief negotiator, this month signaled a willingness to count delivery vehicles as well as warheads, a longstanding Russian request, but not to address the question of counting warheads in storage, which Russia has also sought, until after the December deadline ...

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/world/europe/20start.html?_r=1&ref=europe