By Jonathan Weisman,
The Wall Street Journal,
4 February 2010

U.S., Russia Close In on Nuclear Treaty

U.S. and Russian arms-control negotiators have reached an "agreement in principle" on the first nuclear-arms-reduction treaty in nearly two decades, administration and arms-control officials said Tuesday

WASHINGTON - The deal, which was widely expected, would bring down deployed nuclear warheads and sharply limit the number of missiles and bombers that can deliver them.

Rose Gottemoeller, the Obama administration`s lead negotiator, flew to Geneva Monday to help draft the final text and begin what could still be an arduous process of translating the agreement into treaty language, an administration official said.

"There may be finessing and fine-tuning, but the issues, from our perspective, are all addressed," the official added.

The deal would bring the ceiling for deployed nuclear weapons down to between 1,500 and 1,675 per side, from the 2,200 agreed to in 1991, but nuclear-delivery systems would fall more sharply, to between 700 and 800 each from the current limit of 1,600. In fact, both sides have already reduced their nuclear-armed bombers, submarines and missiles to below 1,000.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said the agreement is a milestone, the first arms-control treaty to not only set goals on warhead deployments but to establish strict limits, with verification measures to hold each side to those limits.

After a series of foreign-policy setbacks, the White House hopes the accord will give President Barack Obama some momentum as he presses ahead with efforts to isolate Iran and North Korea. A Dec. 31 deadline for Tehran to come to the table on nuclear issues slipped, so far, without consequence. Efforts to resume Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are stuck. But the president has wanted some success ahead of a nuclear-proliferation summit in Washington in April.

"At our Nuclear Security Summit in April, we will rally nations behind the goal of securing the world`s vulnerable nuclear materials in four years," Mr. Obama said in a statement Tuesday that was read at a "Global Zero" nuclear-arms summit in Paris.

The breakthrough on a follow-on treaty to the now-lapsed Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty came two weeks ago when National Security Adviser James Jones and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went to Moscow to work through two issues on verification, the sharing of data on missile flight tests and inspections at missile production facilities, White House officials said.

The deal was approved in principle last week during a phone conversation between Mr. Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Under the agreement, the Russians will share flight-test data, something they had resisted as they develop more-modern ballistic missiles. But monitoring of a key ballistic-missile site in Russia, which ended in 2008, won`t resume, according to officials familiar with the accord.

A senior Russian official said major issues are getting resolved and talks are "in the home stretch." The Kremlin is hopeful a deal could be finalized in a few weeks or so, the official said.

The U.S. administration official cautioned that the final drafting could take a week to two months, depending on snags that could arise. When the U.S. and Russian presidents announced the arms-control talks in April of last year, they set a deadline of Dec. 5 to complete them. That deadline slipped, and White House aides are hesitant to declare victory now.

But Mr. Kimball said the deal will clear the way for the broader Obama nuclear agenda. When the accord is formally unveiled, he said, both sides are expected to announce "consultations" on more-ambitious arms talks that would further bring down strategic nuclear forces and limit the deployment of smaller, battlefield nuclear weapons.

The administration is also pushing for the ratification of an international nuclear-test-ban treaty, negotiated during the Clinton administration, ahead of a United Nations conference to review the fraying nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty later this year. Mr. Obama hopes the efforts made with Russia and on the test ban will strengthen his hand as he tries to further isolate the Iranian and North Korean nuclear-weapons programs.

The nuclear deal comes as U.S. officials are increasingly optimistic that Russia is also getting behind a new economic sanctions package on Iran. The Obama administration has coordinated closely with Moscow on the issue and jointly presented a nuclear fuel-swap agreement to Tehran in October in a bid to reduce tensions. Iran`s rejection of the deal, however, has angered Russia and pushed the Kremlin closer to the U.S. position, said American and Russian officials.

-Gregory L. White and Jay Solomon contributed to this article.

Write to Jonathan Weisman at jonathan.weisman@wsj.com