16 January 2002

U.S., Russian Defense Officials Conclude Early Arms Talks

Washington -- U.S. and Russian defense officials are setting up a series of working groups to foster cooperation in verifying reductions of nuclear arsenals, in exchanging data on technology, and in joint antiterrorism efforts, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith says.

"We agreed to set up a number of working groups to cover various areas of our common interest to see if we can identify new types of cooperation and agreements," Feith said January 16 during a special Pentagon briefing.

The delegations -- led by Feith, under secretary for defense policy, and General-Colonel Yuriy Nikolayevich Baluyevskiy, the first deputy chief of the Russian general staff -- held discussions January 15 and 16 in Washington as part of broader diplomatic initiatives between the United States and Russia. These discussions are expected to lead to recommendations for later talks between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov.

Eventually, the negotiations are expected to lead to a summit in May or June between President George Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Feith said the talks also focused on transparency and predictability measures in arms control, but without resorting to what he referred to as the formalized, tortuous style of Cold War agreements between the United States and the former Soviet Union, which tended to institutionalize a kind of hostile relationship.

"We're not looking to get echoes of that, and we're not looking to recreate arms control-style negotiations or agreements," he said. "We do think there are useful things that we can do so that the possibilities of misunderstanding about each other's force structures are reduced, and that's what we are driving at when we talk about transparency and predictability."

Feith said the United States is not ruling out anything as to the form agreements with Russia might take, but wants what is most effective in enhancing cooperation.

Baluyevskiy, however, said during a joint briefing he was "talking about a legally binding document" to codify specific nuclear arms reductions. He said Russia was "happy with the specific number within the region of 1,700 to 2,200 warheads" the United States pledged in November to achieve within a decade. Putin, in talks with Bush at the time, also pledged to respond in kind to warhead reductions in a range of 1,500 to 2,200.

Baluyevskiy also said "we are for irreversibility of the reduction of the nuclear forces. The warheads dismounted from the carriers should be destroyed and eliminated."

The United States, on the other hand, said in its newly released Nuclear Posture Review that the nuclear warheads removed from the strategically deployed U.S. arsenal would be placed in storage and could be retrieved and reactivated on short notice.

And Baluyevskiy said Russia considers the United States withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty a mistake. The Russian Duma passed a resolution January 16 condemning the United States for withdrawing from the treaty, saying the pullout was destabilizing "since it effectively ruins the existing highly efficient system of ensuring strategic stability and paves ground for a new round of the arms race."

However, Feith said the process of improved relations between Russia and the United States has been greatly accelerated by the September 11th terrorist attacks.

"We are not hostile. What we are looking to do with the Russians is develop a view of security that allows us to work together to deal with threats that face both of us and not be thinking of each other as the enemy," Feith said. "The world has changed, and the old way of thinking about strategic stability is just not applicable anymore."

J.D. Crouch, assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, said that as part of this greater cooperation there will be "regularized data exchanges" on technology. What it will not become, though, is "verifying limits of an arms control treaty," he said.

Feith said the goal of these negotiations and working groups "is that we can create a normal relationship with Russia, the kind of relationship that we have with countries all around the world, where they have conventional and in some cases nuclear capabilities, but we have the kind of quality of relationship with them that we don't think that our security requires us to balance our forces against theirs."

"That's why, when we talk about measures of predictability or cooperation or transparency with the Russians, we're doing it based on this new concept, not based on the old balance-of-nuclear-terror ideas from the Cold War," he said.

Copies of transcripts of the joint media availability between Feith and Baluyevskiy, and Feith's separate Pentagon briefing, can be obtained on the Internet at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2002/t01162002_t0116fba.html and http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2002/t01162002_t0116fcb.html.