Russia's foreign minister called yesterday for an end to 10 years of failure in global-disarmament talks, trying to build on an upbeat meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Sergey Lavrov said that a stalemate at the Conference on Disarmament on issues from atomic bombs to space weapons can be broken now that the U.S. administration is "in favor of multilateral approaches to the maintenance of international security and disarmament."
"The right moment has come today, for the first time after the end of the Cold War, for making real progress in resuming the global-disarmament process on a broad agenda," Lavrov told the 65-nation body.
The conference has failed to produce anything of substance since completing the nuclear weapons test-ban treaty in the mid-1990s. Confidence in the body was shattered in the early years of George W. Bush's administration, when the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and from six years of talks on a biological-weapons ban.
Lavrov's tone was markedly different from his last appearance here a year ago, when Russia joined China in challenging the U.S. to eliminate space arms, including defensive shields, and largely ignored Washington's call for all countries to halt production on the fissile material needed for making atomic bombs.
Neither proposal gained much headway, with the diplomatic game largely reflecting the poor understanding between the two superpowers during the last years of the Bush administration.
The United States has labeled the space-weapons offer a political ploy to gain a military advantage because it would prohibit an American missile-interceptor system from being installed in the Czech Republic and Poland. Meanwhile, Chinese and Russian ground-based missiles that can fire into space would not be covered in the plan, which also says nothing of normal satellites that can be used as weapons against other satellites.
Missile defense has been a major irritant for the two nations, and Russia underscored that issue on Friday. In remarks broadcast before the Clinton-Lavrov talks ended, a spokesman for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that a U.S. missile-shield plan for Eastern Europe would have to be either scrapped or reworked. Still, Russian officials in Moscow hailed "very positive signals" from the new U.S. administration.
Yesterday, Lavrov repeated his call for making space weapons-free, but highlighted such other issues as the readiness that he and Clinton indicated Friday to hammer out a successor treaty to the 1991 START I accord cutting U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. It will expire in December.
He urged all nuclear powers to engage in nuclear-disarmament efforts undertaken by Russia and the United States; future agreements to reduce deployable nuclear warheads and stockpiles; the elimination of intermediate-range and long-range ground missiles; and improved weapons verification for solving conflicts around the world.
On a U.S.-backed proposal to ban fissile-material production, Lavrov said that Russia was "prepared to start negotiation on a treaty ... which would become an important milestone in the processes of nuclear disarmament and strengthening the nuclear nonproliferation regime."
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