President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for his initiative to reduce the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons and working for world peace.
Russia is believed to have hundreds of tactical nuclear warheads in storage at the Kola Peninsula, but none of these are accounted for in any international arms control treaties.
-The discussion of the issue is premature, says Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko.
-It would be more logical to finish work on a new agreement to replace the START treaty first, Nesterenko said Thursday interviewed by RIA Novosti.
The Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START 1), signed in 1991, expires on December 5 this year.
U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, confirmed on Thursday that she will go to Moscow next week to have talks about new arms control pact to replace the START 1 treaty, reports Zeenews.
Clinton will meet Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on October 12 to 14. Directly after the talks, Lavrov will travel to Murmansk for the Barents Council meeting with the Foreign Ministers of Norway, Sweden and Finland. The Barents Council meeting will be next Thursday morning in Murmansk, as reported by BarentsObserver.
Russia is said to have deployed nearly 4,000 nuclear weapons. In the north, strategic nuclear weapons are sailing onboard the six Delta-IV class submarines, with home base at the Kola Peninsula. When not at their homeport, just west of Murmansk, the Delta-IV submarines are sailing around in the eastern part of the Barents Sea or in the Arctic Oceans.
In July this year, U.S. President Barack Obama agreed with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to replace the START 1 treaty, which expires in December.
With the additional cuts in the stocks of strategic nuclear weapons stipulated to be someplace between 1,500 and 1,675 operational weapons, Russia will likely continue to keep its current amount of warheads placed onboard its strategic submarines (SSBN) in the northern waters, near the border to Norway.
In its announcement for the prize to Barack Obama, the Norwegian Nobel Committee writes that “The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.
No-one outside the Russian armed forces knows the exact numbers of tachtical nuclear warheads depolyed or on storage in Russia. Tactical nuclear weapons were officially removed from all of the Northern fleet’s multi-purpose submarines in 1992. An agreement between President Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush (the older) from October 1991 stipulated such removal.
But in March this year BarentsObserver reported that such warheads again could be placed onboard the Russian Northern fleets multi-purpose submarines.
- Probably, tactical nuclear weapons will play a key role in the future, the Russian Navy’s deputy chief of staff, Vice Admiral Oleg Burtsev, said in the interview.
Last December, chief of the Russian military’s general staff, Gen. Nikolai Makarov, said Russia will keep its arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons, which he said were necessary to counter a massive NATO advantage in conventional weapons, writes the International Herald Tribune.
