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Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty No Longer Binding: Russia
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Bush
and Putin shake hands upon signing the Treaty of Moscow at the
Kremlin May 24, 2002
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MOSCOW
, June 14
(IslamOnline & News Agencies) –
Russia
tore up Friday,
June 14, the 1993 START II treaty, a nuclear arms reductions pact it
said was made irrelevant by
U.S.
missile defense
plans, considering the treaty no longer binding anymore.
“Russia
sees no conditions in which the START II (Strategic Arms Reduction
Talks) treaty can take effect and no longer feels bound under
international law” to observe its terms, the foreign ministry said
in a statement, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.
The
move comes a day after the official expiry of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile (ABM) treaty which was abrogated unilaterally by the
United States
December, 2002.
It
also follows the
May 24, 2002
signing by the
Russian and
U.S.
presidents
Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush of an arms cuts agreement in which
they pledged to slash their offensive weapons arsenals by two-thirds
over the next decade.
The
START II treaty, signed in January 1993 by Russian and
U.S.
presidents Boris
Yeltsin and George Bush, stipulated a two-thirds reduction in the two
countries’ nuclear arsenals.
Further
protocols were added to the treaty in
New York
in September 1997.
“The
United States
declined to ratify
START II and the
New York
agreements, and moreover withdrew on June 13 from the ABM
treaty, thus invalidating that cornerstone of strategic stability for
three decades,” the ministry said.
Ratified
by the
United States
in 1996 and by
Russia
in May 2000, the
treaty had originally been due to take effect at the end of 2003 but
had been widely regarded as overtaken by events following the
U.S.
decision to
withdraw from the ABM treaty.
Russian
analysts have been predicting for several months that START II would
now never come into force, and Sergei Rogov of the U.S.A.-Canada
Institute said that even the START I treaty signed in July 1991 by
Bush and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev could no longer be
considered binding, AFP said.
“In
the ratification text passed by the State Duma [lower house], it says
START I remains in force only as long as the ABM is in force too,”
he said.
Russia
, which considers
the ABM to have been the linchpin of strategic stability since 1972,
has described the
U.S.
decision to
abrogate the treaty in order to build a missile defense system, as a
“mistake.”
Defense
Minister Sergei Ivanov meanwhile said
Russia
would not
retaliate for the
U.S.
withdrawal from
the ABM treaty.
Speaking
during a visit to
Kyrgyzstan
, he told reporters
that “the
U.S.
national missile
defense system exists in virtual space, not in reality. So there is no
need for retaliation,” Interfax quoted him as saying, AFP reported.
“There
is no telling how the situation in missile defense will develop,” he
added.
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