The remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov signaled that Washington would be unlikely to score quick progress in its push for discussing deeper cuts in nuclear arsenals with Moscow.
Lavrov said that Russia and the United States must first fulfill the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty signed last year by President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev before moving on to further cuts.
The treaty would limit each country to 1,550 strategic warheads, down from the current ceiling of 2,200. The US Senate ratified the pact last month and the Russian Parliament is expected to approve it this month.
“We are convinced that before talking about any further steps in the sphere of nuclear disarmament, limitation and reduction of nuclear weapons it’s necessary to fulfill the New START agreement,” Lavrov said, adding: “It will become clear then what further steps must be taken to strengthen global security and strategic stability.” The US has long pushed Russia to also negotiate cuts in shorter-range nuclear weapons not covered by the New START. Moscow has been reluctant to do that because it sees its massive stockpiles of the so-called tactical nuclear weapons as a compensation for the Western edge in conventional forces and new weapons technologies.
Unlike intercontinental ballistic missiles and long-range bombers armed with nuclear weapons that are covered by the New START, the tactical nuclear weapons are intended to strike battlefield targets at short ranges.
Russia has maintained a large number of such weapons, and Republican critics of the New START claimed that it favored Russia because it doesn’t deal with Russia’s much larger arsenal of tactical nuclear warheads.
Many analysts, however, are dismissive of the military usefulness of these weapons, given the small chance that the US and Russia would face off in a conventional war of tanks and combat forces.
Lavrov said that talks on cutting tactical nuclear warheads must include issues such as potential weaponization of space, strategic missiles equipped with conventional explosives and other non-nuclear conventional weapons.
