US and Russia close to nuclear arms deal

This looks promising:

The U.S. and Russia are close to signing an agreement to slash their arsenals of nuclear weapons, officials said Wednesday, setting the stage for the two former Cold War rivals to sign a treaty in Prague shortly after Easter.

"We're very close to getting an agreement," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

He said the two countries can't finalize the deal until President Barack Obama speaks personally with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, but added that they're likely to talk within the next several days.

"The president, I think, hopes to speak to the Russian leader in the next several days, but there's still some things that need to be worked out," Gibbs said.

"The two presidents will talk soon to finalize the language, but terms have been agreed to and both sides are expecting a signing in Prague in early April," said a person close to the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.

Officials in the Czech Republic said Wednesday that the two leaders are expected to sign the START II treaty in Prague sometime after Easter, or April 4. That would be almost exactly a year after Obama delivered a major speech there spelling out his hopes for a nuclear-free world.

From the Miami Herald.

Amid all this crap, some good news

The US and Russia are shrinking their nuclear arsenal:

The United States and Russia, striving to ease strained relations, announced jointly today that they'll try to put a new nuclear arms reduction deal in place before the existing treaty expires in December.

In advance of their first sit down, U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev issued a joint statement saying the “era when our countries viewed each other as enemies is long over.” They pledged to work together to limit the world's two largest nuclear arsenals, and the White House also announced that Mr. Obama was accepting Mr. Medvedev's invitation to visit Moscow this summer.

As for nuclear arms control, the two said in a joint statement that “we are instructing our negotiators to start talks immediately on this new treaty and to report on results achieved in working out the new agreement by July.”

Their newly-professed commitment to reinvigorate arms-control initiatives that have lain dormant for years caused a stir at the London site of a G20 summit that seemed otherwise transfixed on a deepening worldwide recession.

From the Globe and Mail.