WASHINGTON — U.S. and Russian officials have reached a deal to slash their nuclear arsenals after eight months of unexpectedly tough negotiations, sources close to the talks said Wednesday.
President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, who ordered the negotiations begun last July, still must sign off on the agreement, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday. The two leaders are expected to sign a treaty in Prague next month.
The new treaty will replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991 and will set limits for the number of long-range deployed nuclear warheads, as well as the numbers of nuclear-capable bombers and missiles.
The two final obstacles were an agreement on how to verify the size of the nuclear arsenals and the issue of missile defense. Neither government would explain how it solved those disagreements. The two sides previously agreed to reduce the number of long-range nuclear warheads deployed by each nation from a ceiling of 2,200 to between 1,500 and 1,675.
The deal also would require each side to cut back their stock of strategic bombers and land- and sea-based missiles to 800, down from 1,600.
The deal is the biggest step so far in Obama’s effort to scale back the world’s nuclear arsenals, and it is to be followed later by other reductions from the U.S. and Russia.
The two nations’ arsenals represent 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.
Yet the difficulty of the negotiations was sobering for administration officials, who came to the job with optimism about Obama’s ambitions. Some officials, who expected the talks to go smoothly, confided privately during the negotiations that they had misjudged Russia’s eagerness to craft a replacement treaty.
U.S. officials believed going into the negotiations that they would be relatively simple because both countries seemed to agree that they did not need their arsenals at the current size.
But as the talks went on, the Americans found their counterparts more demanding than expected on the terms of the deal and more suspicious about U.S. intentions. The Russians seemed to believe the Americans wanted the deal more than they did, and they sought to use that in the negotiations, U.S. officials have said.
There also seemed to be complications arising from differences among Russian leaders. In recent months, they have expressed different views on U.S. missile-defense plans.
Moscow has been deeply concerned for years about U.S. plans for an anti-missile umbrella, fearing it could, if expanded later, neutralize Russia’s huge arsenal of offensive missiles.
Russian officials were angry about the Bush administration’s plans for a missile-defense system that was to be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic. The U.S. said the shield was intended to counter Iran’s missile program, but Russian officials feared that stationing an anti-missile system inside former Soviet allies would encroach on Moscow’s area of influence near its borders. Obama agreed last year to cancel the program.
One knowledgeable source said that “95 percent of the agreement has been done for a long time. It was that last 5 percent that was the doozie.”
“All the documents for the signing of the strategic-arms treaty have been coordinated and agreed upon,” a Kremlin spokesman who spoke on condition of anonymity said Wednesday night. “It’s now up to the presidents of Russia and the United States to define the time and place for the signing.”
The Russian government has not officially responded to a Czech Republic announcement that the new START accord would be signed in Prague. But the Kremlin source acknowledged the signing would probably take place in the Czech capital.
To go into effect, the treaty will have to be ratified by both the U.S. Senate and the Russian legislature.
Success on the treaty is apt to boost Obama’s broader nonproliferation effort. The administration aims to convince smaller non-nuclear states that they do not need nuclear arms. This deal will strengthen U.S. arguments that the nuclear states are doing their part to reduce the world’s nuclear inventory.
The signing ceremony will come in the days before Obama convenes an international conference on nuclear security in Washington.
