Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to cut the Russian nuclear arsenal to a range of 1,500 to 2,200 warheads in response to a similar U.S. offer, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday.

“President Putin has now responded to [U.S. President George W. Bush’s] Washington-Crawford statement of reducing our strategic offensive inventory down to a range of 1,700 to 2,200 operationally deployed warheads,” Powell said (Elaine Monaghan, Reuters/Yahoo.com, Dec. 13).

The announced U.S. reduction (see GSN, Nov. 14) is a “pretty firm number,” Powell said, but the United States welcomed discussion on the issue.  “We want to hear why [Russia] feels that particular number is appropriate,” Powell said.  “Obviously our range fits within their range.  So there’s a way to square this circle.  I don’t know that it’s a problem” (Federal News Service transcript, Dec. 13).

The United States and Russia will continue work on a new arms control framework in order to bring everything into “some legal form” that the two presidents could sign when Bush travels to Moscow next year, Powell said (see GSN, Dec. 11). 

Powell said that the recent U.S. decision to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty had not triggered a new arms race with Russia (see related GSN story, today).

“Quite the contrary,” he said.  “The Russians have said they don’t see this as a threat to their national security and secondly they are going to go ahead with very deep cuts in their strategic offensive forces” (Monaghan, Reuters/Yahoo.com).

Putin Wants Cuts Codified

Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed Russia’s support for a legally binding treaty to codify the strategic nuclear reductions.

“I believe these agreements should have legal treaty form,” Putin said in an interview Thursday.  “I think without that, it could so happen that partners would have suspicions and misgivings about what was happening with the other party’s weapons—whether they had actually been reduced, what were the actual numbers, where the weapons were, had they been destroyed or had they just been dismantled and put in storage somewhere.  If they are stored they constitute so-called ‘reconstitution potential.’  In other words, the possibility would remain that those weapons could be put back on missiles,” Putin said.

“In other words, if we do have such a legal treaty, legal agreement, a transparent one with proper verification measures, the entire world could be safer and feel calmer,” Putin said.

Russian Nuclear Plans

Although Russia reserved the right to deploy more multiple-warhead ICBMs, Putin said Russia had no reason to do so at this time.  Russia’s deterrence capability would be secure even if the United States deployed a limited missile defense system, he said (Financial Times, Dec. 14).

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