US and Russia to hold new round of arms reduction talks (Roundup)

Jun 22, 2009, 19:40 GMT

Geneva - Russian and US officials were holding talks this week on replacing a nuclear arms reduction treaty that is set to expire at the end of the year, officials said Monday.

The talks are aimed at finding a successor to the cold war-era Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START), which expires in December. They take place in Geneva, where the two sides held a previous round of negotiations earlier this month.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the two sides had already begun discussing 'specific numbers' on further reducing their vast nuclear arsenals, though Kelly would not offer those figures.

'We do want to have a significant reduction,' Kelly said in Washington.

Rose Gottemoeller, the under secretary of state for arms control, is expected to lead the US delegation while the Russian team would be headed by Anatoly Antonov, the director of the department on disarmament at the foreign ministry.

Experts from defense, space and atomic divisions of the ministries attended the previous round of talks.

The previous Geneva round followed the first session held last month in Moscow.

Speaking earlier this month to the Conference on Disarmament, hosted at the United Nations Office at Geneva, Gottemoeller said the talks were 'productive.'

But few details are expected to be released on progress in the negotiations until US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev meet in Moscow on July 6.

The new US administration has been pushing to 'reset' its relations with Moscow after the past few years were marked by some of the highest tensions since the Cold War.

Russian officials have said they want the disarmament talks to extend beyond nuclear weapons.

The negotiations should include, they said, a deal for the US to scrap the controversial missile defence shield plans for eastern Europe that the previous administration laid out, and which Moscow opposes.

But Kelly said the two issues 'should be dealt with independently.' The Obama administration had yet to decide the ultimate fate of the missile shield, he said.

'We've made no final decisions regarding basing missile defence in Europe, which will be based on an assessment of the threat to the United States and its allies,' Kelly said.