November 22, 2008	Saturday	Ziqa'ad 23, 1429

GENEVA, Nov 21: The United States and Russia ended talks on Friday on the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) without making a decision on extending the landmark pact, which expires in a year, a US statement said.

Officials from the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, where Soviet nuclear weapons were withdrawn under the treaty, also took part in the week-long discussions among technical experts in Geneva.

“The parties desire to point out that there was no treaty requirement to make a decision to extend the treaty at this meeting,” said the US statement issued after the session.

Officials from all five countries involved would “continue to consider the issue and note that a decision on this issue can be made up until the date of expiration of the treaty on December 5, 2009,” it said. No date for a next round of discussions was announced.

START was the first treaty to reduce the superpowers’ strategic offensive weapons. Its provisions specified that talks on a successor agreement need to begin at least a year before the original pact expires.

Washington sent Moscow a proposal last month for a follow-on to the Cold War-era pact. Moscow has indicated it would be willing to consider US proposals for a new version of the pact, whose implementation is overseen by a joint commission. But with President George Bush leaving office in two months, real decisions are likely to be left to his successor, arms control analysts said.

The Geneva talks should help the outgoing administration to hand over a detailed state of play to the incoming team of President-elect Barack Obama, they said.

“It would help everybody understand what they need to be telling the transition team about the process, what they need to say to the Obama team to get them ready to take over this dossier,” said one disarmament expert.

Obama has said he would seek real, verifiable reductions in all US and Russian nuclear weapons and try to extend the monitoring and verification provisions of the START treaty.

The United States and Russia said in 2001 that they had met requirements under the pact to deploy a maximum of 6,000 nuclear warheads each.—Reuters