A Russian general called Wednesday for a legally binding agreement on "irreversible" cuts in nuclear weapons Wednesday at the end of two days of talks Moscow with US defense officials.
The two sides agreed to set up working groups on a number of issues, including strategic nuclear arms cuts, to work toward agreements that could be signed when President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet again in May or June.
Both presidents have called for slashing strategic nuclear weapons arsenals by more than two-thirds over the next decade, from 6,000 warheads to between 2,200 and 1,700.
But the two sides remained at odds over a US plan to keep decommissioned warheads in reserve in case conditions change and Russia's insistence that the cuts be formalized in a legally binding document.
"We are for transparency, we are for predictability, but also we are for irreversibiity of the reduction of the nuclear forces," said General Yury Baluyevsky, the deputy chief of the Russian general staff.
"We are following the principle that the whole nuclear weapons should be destroyed," he said after the meetings at the Pentagon.
Moreover, he said, Russia wanted any agreement to be signed by the two presidents to be legally binding.
"You are talking about a statement, I am talking about a legally binding document," he said in response to a reporter's question.
Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, said the United States was not looking "to recreate arms control-style negotiations or agreements" of the kind reached with the Soviet Union.
"We do think there are useful things that we can do so that misunderstandings about each others force structure are reduced," he said.
"Once we have decided what we agree on we will pick the appropriate form for it. We're completely open minded on the subject, we're not ruling anything in or anything out. We're taking a very pragmatic approach."
He said they agreed to set up working groups on variety of areas including on measures to lend "transparency and predictability" to the nuclear arms reductions.
Working groups will explore other areas of cooperation as well, including missile defense, counter-proliferation, and counter-terrorism, said Feith, who led the US delegation.
(China Daily January 18, 2002)
