A new US-Russian nuclear arms control is a month overdue and will take another couple of weeks at least Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in Oslo nearly a month ago, was a European down-payment on expected future actions – most of all in the field of nuclear disarmament, on which Obama’s rhetoric had soared highest and his intentions had been clearest. Delivering the goods has inevitably turned out to be a more complicated matter. By the time Obama turned up in Oslo, the US and Russia were supposed to have clinched a nuclear arms control deal to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) which expired four days before the Nobel ceremony. It did not happen. At about that time, I was assured by various diplomats that there were a few remaining technical problems on verification that would be resolved before Obama and Dmitry Medvedev flew to Copenhagen on December 18 for the climate change talks, fountain pens handily in their pockets. That did not come to pass either, nor did other predictions in the US press of a deal by the end of last year. Now it looks like an agreement is a fortnight away at best. The negotiating teams are due to reconvene in Geneva in the middle of this month to make another assault on the remaining obstacles
Read the original:
START stalled
