Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev could sign a nuclear arms reduction treaty in March or April, Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev said Tuesday.
Negotiations on a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that resumed in Geneva on Monday "are approaching their logical conclusion," Patrushev said in New Delhi.
He said the treaty "could be signed in March or April of this year."
Obama and Medvedev spoke last week and pledged to complete the treaty, which expired Dec. 5 and covers strategic nuclear weapons.
The foreign ministers of Sweden and Poland, meanwhile, said the time has come for an arms control regime to also cover tactical nuclear weapons, which are designed to be used on the battlefield rather than placed on intercontinental ballistic missiles.
"Such weapons are dangerous remnants of a dangerous past — and they should not be allowed to endanger our common future," Sweden's Carl Bildt and Radek Sikorski of Poland said in an op-ed published in the International Herald Tribune on Tuesday.
The United States is believed to store about 200 warheads in Western Europe, and Russia holds about 2,000 warheads, mostly in Western Russia, the two ministers said. They urged the former Cold War foes to "greatly reduce" those weapons, by negotiations or unilateral moves, as steps toward their total elimination.
"With some exceptions, tactical nuclear weapons were designed for outdated, large-scale war on the European continent," they said.
The ministers also said Moscow should withdraw such arms from the Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea and the Kola Peninsula of northwestern Russia, areas bordering the European Union.
"Such a withdrawal could be accompanied by the destruction of relevant storage facilities," the ministers said.
On Tuesday, Bildt was to address a conference in Paris of Global Zero, a nongovernmental nuclear disarmament group that includes more than 200 political leaders and military officials from around the world.
Obama and Medvedev offered their support in written messages to the conference. Obama said disarmament is "one of my highest priorities," while Medvedev called it a priority.
(AP, Reuters)
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