The United States is to send a top arms-control official to Moscow to convince the Russians to continue to decommission deployed nuclear weapons by saying it would save the two countries $8 billion a year, Kommersant reported citing an undisclosed source.
The initiative will target weapon categories not covered by the Russian-US agreement, which is called New START. The treaty pretends that strategic bombers can carry only a single warhead instead of up to 20 and does not consider weapons held in storage and smaller-scale tactical weapons.
A more drastic reduction would bring down the number of warhead by another third to some 1,000 to 1,100, according to the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit journalistic organization. The number would be sufficient to maintain US’ deterrence capability and would not require structural changes to nuclear forces, the consensus in Washington says.
White House officials reportedly believe that the approaching limit of 1,550 strategic deployed nuclear weapons, agreed upon in the 2010 New START agreement, could be brought down to 1,000 without compromising nuclear deterrence between the two powers.
Pyotr Topychkanov, a nonproliferation programme coordinator at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that "in terms of its defence strategy, the US is shifting its focus toward conventional [non-nuclear] weapons, while Russia remains more nuclear-dependent. Therefore, it is easier for the US to talk about further nuclear arms reductions."
"Russia cannot keep up with the pace of these [conventional-weapon] developments and thus still heavily relies on its nuclear might," he added. "In contrast with the US, Russia also finds itself in a close vicinity of many other nuclear-weapon states, such as India, Pakistan and North Korea."
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