Nuclear-arms control heads Obama's Moscow agenda

MOSCOW —

When President Obama arrives in Moscow today for meetings with Kremlin leadership, at the top of his agenda will be reducing the number of strategic nuclear weapons capable of destroying life on Earth.

Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have pledged to extend or replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) — a 1991 agreement to reduce the number of long-range nuclear warheads in both countries that is set to expire in December.

After their April meeting in London, the two leaders set an apparent benchmark by saying they would go below the levels set by a 2002 pact, known as the Moscow Treaty, which calls for no more than 1,700 to 2,200 strategic warheads in each country by the end of 2012.

In an interview with The New York Times on Saturday, Obama stressed that "I've made clear that we will retain our deterrent capacity as long as there is a country with nuclear weapons."

But reducing arsenals, he insisted, would be the first step toward giving the United States and a growing body of allies the power to remake the nuclear world. Among the goals: halting weapons programs in North Korea and Iran, discouraging states from abandoning the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and ending global production of fuel for nuclear arms, a step sure to upset Pakistan, India and Israel.

But opposition is rising. "This is dangerous, wishful thinking," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

They contend that Obama is naive for assuming "the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces."

North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests, and experts say Iran will be able to build a warhead soon, if it cannot do so already. Pakistan has the world's fastest-growing arsenal, India's is improving, and Israel's nuclear capacity has never been publicly discussed, much less dealt with, by the United States.

Obama and his aides say they want to address all these issues — although they have only recently begun to discuss strategy.

"We tried the unilateral way, in the Bush years, and it didn't work," a senior administration official said in a recent interview. "What we are trying is a fundamental change, a different view that says our security can be enhanced by arms control. There was a view for the past few years that treaties only constrained the good actors and not the bad actors."

Obama and like-minded leaders will have to establish a new global order that will truly prevent rogue states from moving ahead with their nuclear projects — goals that the current nonproliferation framework has repeatedly failed to achieve.

"The problem we face is that it looks to many in Congress that we are building down at the very moment many others are building up," an Obama strategist conceded. "It could be one of the toughest fights of this presidency."

The Obama administration expects to make progress with Russian leaders on nuclear-arms reduction, although a White House official said a final agreement is unlikely during Obama's three-day visit to Moscow.

"We hope that they will be able to make an announcement tomorrow [Monday] that can show some progress," said Gary Samore, a National Security Council official for arms control. "There's obviously still a long way to go before we reach agreement on a final treaty by the end of this year," he told reporters at a briefing in Moscow.

"We will try reach agreement on the final treaty by December," Samore said.

Negotiators for Obama and Medvedev "have moved issues to the point where the two presidents can have a productive meeting," Samore said. Still, he said disagreements remain, citing verification procedures and differences between the U.S. and Russian delivery systems for nuclear weapons. The United States, for instance, has more nuclear-armed submarines, while Russia has more land-based launchers.

Discussions about a proposed U.S. missile-defense shield based in Eastern Europe will occur "in parallel" with the talks on a news arms treaty, Samore said. The Russians need to be convinced "what we are doing on missile defense doesn't pose a treat to their nuclear deterrent."

Obama left on Sunday for the talks in Moscow with Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He will also meet with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during his stay, before leaving for the Group of Eight summit in Italy.

Compiled from McClatchy Newspapers, The Associated Press, The New York Times and Bloomberg News