During his election campaign President Obama placed a high emphasis on dealing with one of the greatest threats we all face - reducing the vast numbers of nuclear missiles held by both Russia and the United States.
As he put it in his inauguration speech "With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat" In response to an arms control survey he was more specific – "I will not authorize the development of new nuclear weapons. And I will make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of U.S. nuclear policy."
Yesterday we saw what could be the first step towards achieving that goal - when both Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev took time away from the G20 negotiations to hold a press conference and announce that they had agreed to start work on a replacement for the 1991 START (Strategic Arms Reduction) treaty that is due to expire in nine months time. There's an urgency to renegotiating START 1, as it codifies the intrusive verification mechanisms that govern all the other nuclear treaties that followed, and if it expires without replacement then so do these verification measures.
START 1 is a key piece of legislation as it contains and codifies intrusive verification mechanisms that govern all the other treaties. The problem is that if START 1 expires, then so do the verification measures. Without proper verification, it is unlikely that either side will agree to go for even greater cuts.
It's a story that would have been huge on any other day. It was the first positive meeting between Russia and the US on arms control in many years and there were hints that there will be substantial nuclear weapons cuts to follow.
This is just the start – after the meeting Russian and American nuclear negotiators began the heavy, detailed process of making the terms and conditions work. Agreement certainly won't be straightforward, yet senior US officials are calling it an aspirational document, one which represents a statement of new possibilities in US-Russian relations. They're talking of hitting key milestones ahead of the next Obama/Medvedev meeting in July, allowing the two Presidents to announce a significantly improved post-START agreement when the original treaty runs out in December 2009.
"I will not authorize the development of new nuclear weapons. And I will make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of U.S. nuclear policy."
Barack Obama
Both Presidents gave each other credit for agreeing an ambitious agenda. Discussion become possible because of Obama's change of language about missile defence; the Russians have repeatedly linked a new START deal to Washington abandoning plans to place elements of a missile shield in central Europe. Plans which George Bush provocatively put at the cornerstone of his nuclear policy, but which Obama has always been lukewarm about because of their exorbitant cost and the fact that the technology simply doesn't work. It's his willingness to abandon Bush's unworkable and threatening strategy which may now enable progress to be made relatively quickly.
Despite the overwhelming urgency of a drastically deteriorating economy, Barack Obama has so far stuck to his campaign promise to make control of the spread of nuclear weapons a top priority of his administration. So, time for some cautious optimism perhaps? Certainly the picture is looking far brighter than it did under the previous regimes of George W Bush and Vladimir Putin, and the sense of urgency is palpable.
