Official: US, Russia begin new round of START talks

Jul 22, 2009, 9:34 GMT

Geneva - Delegations from the US and Russian governments began a new round of talks Wednesday on replacing START, the nuclear arms reduction treaty that is set to expire at the end of the year, an official said.

The Russian diplomat told the German Press Agency dpa that the teams arrived at the Russian diplomatic mission in Geneva in the late morning and were set to begin three days of talks.

This is the first round of talks since US President Barack Obama met with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow earlier this month and reached a basic agreement that there must be a follow- up treaty.

The first meeting on a successor to the cold war-era Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was held in Moscow two months ago, followed by two rounds in Geneva, leading up to the high-level summit.

Obama and Medvedev reached a 'joint understanding,' which aims to reduce the number of nuclear warheads held by each to between 1,500 and 1,675, compared with the maximum of 2,200 under START.

They would also aim to reduce the number of missiles capable of delivering warheads from the current maximum of 1,600 allowed for each side to between 500 and 1,100.

Experts from defence, space and atomic divisions of the foreign and defence ministries of the two nuclear powers regularly take part in the negotiations.