Free Republic

MINSK (Reuters) – The United States and Russia will sign a deal this year to cut vast Cold War arsenals of nuclear weapons but may miss an early December deadline, a Kremlin source told Reuters on Friday. Diplomats from the two biggest nuclear powers are trying to prepare a new agreement on cutting atomic weapons before the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires on December 5. The new accord will be signed "in a European country" in December, the Kremlin source told Reuters in Minsk, where President Dmitry Medvedev was meeting regional leaders. "We may not be able to do...

Moscow, 16 June: The Russian Strategic Missile Troops [RSMT] together with the [Moscow-based] Askond company have started the programme of scrapping train-mounted mobile strategic missile systems, decommissioned from the land-based strategic nuclear forces. The decommissioning is part of Russia's obligations under the Soviet-American Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START-1), the RSMT press service told ITAR-TASS today. In accordance with the approved procedure for disposal of railway-based missile systems, not all their components will be scrapped, but mobile launching systems alone. These launching systems are used for transporting, storing and launching three-stage solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) RS-22B (SS-24 Scalpel by western...