When US president-elect Joe Biden enters the White House next week, his administration would be in a race against time to salvage a landmark nuclear arms accord with Russia.
The New START, which expires just 16 days after Biden’s inauguration, is the last major arms reduction pact between old foes whose bulging nuclear stockpiles dominated fears for global security during the Cold War.
The fast-approaching deadline to find compromise comes as tensions between Moscow and Washington are at fever pitch over hacking allegations, and after Biden vowed to take a firm stand against Russia.
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The stakes of reaching an agreement are high, said Elena Chernenko, a foreign editor at Russia’s Kommersant newspaper who has closely followed negotiations.
“The treaty limits the chances of one side miscalculating the intentions or plans of the other, which we saw happen several times leading to very dangerous moments during the Cold War,” she said.
Any agreement is also likely to define spending priorities for both governments, Russian political columnist Vladimir Frolov said.
Extending New START could determine in Moscow and Washington whether “more money than necessary would have to be spent on nuclear toys as opposed to healthcare,” he said.
New START was signed in 2010 between then-US president Barack Obama and former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, curbing warheads to 1,550 each and restricting numbers of launchers and bombers.
Biden would be eager to score a big diplomatic win early in his term, but he is also under pressure to tread a fine line and make good on a campaign promise to be tough on Russia.
Lawmakers in the US demanded punishment for Russia last year after concluding that Kremlin-backed hackers were behind a sweeping cyberintrusion into government institutions.
That standoff is just the latest in a litany of disagreements over conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and allegations of Russian election meddling.
Still, rhetoric from Moscow and Washington as the New START expiration deadline approaches has raised hopes that arms control could offer a rare area of compromise.
Biden’s incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan said this month that the president-elect had tasked officials with looking at extending New START “right out of the gates.”
In Moscow, Putin proposed a one-year extension without preconditions and tasked Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov with obtaining a “coherent” US response to the offer.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a champion of Soviet-era arms accords with the US, this week said he expects Biden to prolong the accord and urged both sides “to negotiate further reductions.”
“Russia is on record at the highest level that it wants to extend the treaty for five years without any preconditions,” Frolov said.
Moscow is in favor of an extension, he said, because it would allow Russia to modernize its own nuclear forces at an affordable and measured pace, without rushing into an arms race.
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