US says arms talks with Russia are productive

The head of the U.S. team negotiating a new arms pact with Russia said Thursday that a three-day round of talks in Geneva was "productive."

Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller told the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament that the two sides hope to give a progress report by July to their countries' presidents on replacing the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

"We have been here in Geneva for the past three days with the United States delegation, engaged in productive talks with our Russian counterparts, working toward a START follow-on agreement," said Gottemoeller. The treaty expires Dec. 5.

She said presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev had instructed their negotiating teams to seek an agreement further lowering nuclear arsenals, with effective verification measures based on what has been learned from implementing START.

There was no immediate comment from her counterpart, Anatoly Antonov, who is chief of the Russian Foreign Ministry's security and arms control department.

Medvedev's spokeswoman Nataliya Timakova said earlier this week that the talks may achieve progress on a new accord by the time Obama visits Moscow July 6-8.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband welcomed the talks as bringing gains for both the U.S. and Russia, enabling them to cooperate on "meeting the real, shared threats they face."

Gottemoeller praised the conference for agreeing last week to negotiate a new treaty to ban production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium needed to create atomic weapons.

She urged the delegations to press on with negotiations and explore other areas so they can move toward Obama's vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.

START, signed by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush, led each country to cut its nuclear warheads by at least one-quarter, to about 6,000.

In 2002, then-presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush signed the so-called Treaty of Moscow, which called for further cuts to between 1,700 and 2,200 operationally deployed warheads by 2012.

Failure to negotiate a replacement to START would leave Russia and the U.S. unable to inspect and verify each other's stockpile of nuclear warheads.