Following the exchange of documents between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, both sides commented on the importance of the new treaty for world peace.
Mr Lavrov said: “Russia and the United States accepted their responsibility for security in the world, and demonstrated their readiness to move further towards providing stability.”
Mrs Clinton said: “When it comes to the button that has worried us the most over the years – the one that would unleash nuclear destruction – today we take another step to ensure it will never be pushed.”
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has welcomed the treaty. CND general secretary Kate Hudson told Tribune that Barack Obama has now achieved the first step in his plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
She said: “The entry into force of the New Start treaty, reducing numbers of US and Russian nuclear weapons, is good news.”
However, she argued that the US President needs to take further steps if his objective of a world free of nuclear weapons can ever be realised.
She noted that during Mr Obama’s recent state of the union address, he “failed to indicate any forward programme of further reductions” adding: “It would be a major setback for global security if the US reverts to the nuclear belligerence of former times.”
While the world has undoubtedly become a safer place as a result of New Start, dangers remain.
Speaking at the Munich conference, Mr Lavrov warned that should his government consider America’s plan to build a missile defence shield in Europe a threat to Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent, then Moscow would pull out of the treaty and that “the imbalance will have to be compensated” – a veiled reference to the construction of new ICBMs capable of penetrating a missile shield.
Indeed, late last year Russia announced it is developing a replacement for its SS-18 Satan ICBM – the most powerful ballistic missile in the world with a payload 500 times greater than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasak.
