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One of the objectives of the Gorbachevian reforms in Soviet Union in 1980s was to reduce tensions between the cold war adversaries, but the stated objective remains a distant dream. Even while scenarios for total disarmament and denuclearization are out of sight, the so-called arms reduction talks keep happening as a formality to keep the watching media world in good humors. But all these talks only increased arms around the world with every nation spending more sources on deadly weapons under the guises of  vague “security threats”  only to help their broker mafias grow richer. The net result is huge piles of weapons in global and regional depots desperately waiting for transportation to the customers, apart from huge arms arsenals in every military depot around the world.

A few serious issues - above all the economic and security concerns- have remained bottlenecks in the smooth relations between the most important powers of the world, USA and Russia. Currently, Moscow has been at loggerheads with Washington over plans to deploy a missile defense system in Central Europe. The US leading NATO which is keen to extent its borders to tight upto Russia, earlier signed agreements with the Czech Republic on hosting a radar station and with Poland on the deployment of 10 interceptor missiles by 2013. Russia says the missile shield would be a threat to its national security while the US has just argued it is needed to guard against the threat of missile attacks from states such as Iran.

START, signed in 1991 just before the break-up of the Soviet Union, bound both sides to deep cuts in their nuclear arsenals. Russo-US summits are a routine affair now without achieving anything tangible in view also of other complicated standoffs on various international issues. Russian and US negotiators on June 03 wrapped up their second round of talks on replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-I), which expires on December 5, amid a swift thaw in relations between the superpowers. US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Rose Gottemoeller told the international Conference on Disarmament that the two superpowers were seeking to reduce their nuclear weapons below the levels set in the 1991 START treaty. A Russian diplomat said after the first round of formal negotiations ended that the talks were held in a constructive spirit. He gave no details on where progress had been made. "We agreed that the first results of work on a new agreement will be reported in the forthcoming meeting in early July in Moscow," the diplomat said. Russia and the USA have had “productive” talks on cutting their nuclear arsenals. The two countries agreed at talks this week “to hold the next round of talks in the second half of June.

Last month U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev ordered officials to begin the complicated talks needed to find a replacement for START, one of the biggest arms reduction deals in history. The USA and Russia have, May 19-20, held two days of successful talks on ways to slash vast stockpiles of Cold War nuclear weapons.

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Meanwhile, Russia and the US have begun work on a new treaty to replace the START I, which expires in December. Obama said after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier in May that Moscow and Washington had a great chance to 'reset' relations. The term 'reset' has been used on a number of occasions by the Obama administration with relation to Russia-US ties. In March, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Lavrov with a yellow box with a large red 'reset' button on it, which she asked Lavrov to push with her. On either side of the button the word 'reset' was written in English and what was supposed to be a Russian translation. Obviously it wasn’t a joke.  

Interestingly enough, on May 14, Russian space agency Roscosmos and the US space agency NASA agreed on a new price for ferrying US astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) after 2012, an official said. NASA will now pay $51 million for a single seat on Soyuz spacecraft.. NASA earlier said it planned to buy up to 24 seats aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft to fly US astronauts to the ISS after the space shuttle is retired in September 2010. Earlier, in 2007, NASA signed a $719 million contract for 15 Soyuz seats and 5.6 tones of cargo on return trips to the ISS. NASA said these space flights are being procured through Roscosmos because the Soyuz is the only proven crew transportation and rescue vehicle currently compatible and able to dock to the ISS.

Today the seas are full of debris dumped into them by the nations surrounding them.

Although both coordinate their activities around the world and beyond Afghanistan and Central Asia, the USA is still wary about Moscow’s hidden agendas and pretty annoyed that Russians don’t consult the Americans as others do before they embark upon new ventures. Russia is going ahead with a program for floating Arctic nuke stations. The Kremlin in May said is planning to build a fleet of more floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves, ignoring the protests from the environmentalists. A Prototype floating nuclear power station being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk, Russia is due to be completed next year. An agreement to build a further four was reached between the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and the northern Siberian republic of Yakutiya in February. The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, Russia’s largest oil firm.

The US Geological Survey believes the Arctic holds up to 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves, leading some experts to call the region the next Saudi Arabia. The technological exploitation of the region is next to impossible due to sea ice, strong winds and temperatures that can dip to below -50C. Many countries bordering the Arctic see climate change as the chance to exploit areas that were once inaccessible and to open trade routes between the Pacific and Atlantic.

The building of the nuclear power stations would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years. In addition, designers are known to have developed submarine nuclear-powered drilling rigs that could allow eight wells to be drilled at a time. This is causing widespread alarm among environmentalists Bellona, a leading Scandinavian environmental watchdog group, condemned the idea of using nuclear power to open the Arctic to oil, gas and mineral production, terming it as a highly risky proposition. Environmentalists also fear that if additional radioactive waste is produced, it will be dumped into the sea.

Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the US have all claimed large areas of the Arctic in the past five years. Russia has a long record of polluting the Arctic with radioactive waste. Countries including Britain have had to offer Russia billions of dollars to decommission more than 160 nuclear submarines, but at least 12 nuclear reactors have been dumped, along with more than 5,000 containers of solid and liquid nuclear waste, on the northern coast and on the island of Novaya Zemlya. 

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Apart from the issue of Russian membership to WTO, the US-Russia talks are complicated by Washington’s plan to station elements of an anti-missile system in Poland and Czech Republic, in order to intercept rockets fired from what it sees as rogue states, such as Iran. Russia says the plan will undermine its national security. The ties got further mutilated by the re3cent Russia-Georgia standoff. The next talks will be the third round since the two countries began detailed discussions on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) on nuclear weapons, which expires in December this year. Diplomats have suggested that an initial deal on renewing or replacing the treaty could be ready for a summit between US President Barack Obama and Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow on July 6-8. The confidential negotiations are meant to feed in to an Obama-Medvedev summit in Moscow in July.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the USA must allay Russian concerns over the missile system to achieve a breakthrough in the nuclear weapons talks. "The fundamental principle of an agreement must be equal security for both sides and the preservation of strategic parity," he told reporters at the 19th century mansion where the talks took place. "This of course cannot be ensured without taking into account the situation with anti-missile defense." Lavrov said the nuclear talks should also take account of any plans for space-based missiles and the development of highly destructive non-nuclear weapons.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on May 16, he hoped there would be progress in resolving all outstanding issues between Moscow and Washington during his upcoming meeting with his US counterpart Barack Obama. Medvedev told journalists after talks with visiting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi it can move dialogue to a new level.  Medvedev and Berlusconi met outside Moscow to discuss the upcoming G8 summit due to be held in July in Italy. Berlusconi said that Russia and the US had every chance of resolving any issues between them. 'In early July this year, several days prior to the (G8) summit in Italy, we will have a large meeting with Obama in Russia. However, President Obama said last month that the USA would go ahead with the anti-missile system if Washington thought there was a continued threat from Iran. But the system would have great difficulty distinguishing between warheads fired from Iran and the decoys that might accompany them. A study said the proposed shield "cannot provide a dependable defense for Europe or the United States” against Iranian missiles.

Finding a deal could warm relations between Russia and the United States after bitter arguments under former U.S.. President George W. Bush over missile defense, NATO expansion and last August's war between Russia and Georgia. The negotiators face tight pressure to work through scores of complicated technical issues -- including differences over how to count nuclear weapons and ensure compliance -- before the December 5 deadline for replacing START.

The START-I deal was one of several building blocks in broader moves towards nuclear disarmament and curbs on proliferation. Finding a replacement for the 1991 START I before it expires on December 5 could herald a thaw in relations between the world's biggest two nuclear powers. By all means, START has to restart to find sustainable and reliable means for disarmament, de-militarization and denuclearization processes. Apart from purely military security issues, environmental issues- particularly the climate change – should also engage the attention of both USA and Russia as member of UNSC and most powerful nations around today. If the USA and Russia are seeking for tension reductions in their ties, both could try to address these issues more vigorously and sincerely. That would, in turn, pave way for world peace as well in a big way. 

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Dr. Abdul Ruff Colachal

Independent Researcher in World Affairs, The only Indian to have gone through entire India, a fraud and terror nation,
South Asia.