Source: Voice of Russia
Recently U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev have discussed the START Treaty, which is yet to be ratified by the Senate and Russian State Duma. On Tuesday Rose Gottemoeller, Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance, announced that the USA would like to hold talks with Russia concerning the reduction of tactical and non-deployed nuclear weapons, after the ratification of START.
During the term of President George Bush the USA refused to discuss space disarmament project. However, Obama’s administration decided to change the course and to hold talks concerning this issue. Peter Topychkanov, Nonproliferation Program coordinator from the Carnegie Moscow Center, explains the reasons for such a change.
The reasons of this change is an understanding of the administration that weaponization of outer space is a threat for the United States itself because the former administration led by George Bush believed that the United States is the leader in the field of new weapons, new arms, systems and that the United States doesn’t have any opponents in this field. But the test lead by China in 2009 showed them that other states can develop such systems and this system can become a threat for the Unites States itself. That is why the new administration is changing approach to the problem of the weaponization of space and new administration starts discussions about it.
Frank Rose who represented the US at the disarmament conference in Geneva announced that though the US is eager to discuss arms control in space it is not going to sign any treaties and agreements. Why the US is being so cautious about it?
New treaty is a difficult issue because the past negotiations on nuclear and space weapons have shown that if one country keeps its technical programs in a complete secrecy and its decisions closed off to any critic analysis, trying at the same time to use negotiations for its own political and propaganda aims, the diplomatic forces lose focus, and talks become routine and useless. So, to start negotiations and to achieve new treaty the United States, Russia and other states, leading in this field, have to open their programs to become more transparent in the space programs and that is very difficult issue.
Since the US is not going to sign any treaties what might be the measures taken to keep space arms under control?
I believe that the first step in this direction can be code of conduct in space agreed some years ago and it’s not a treaty it’s just code of conduct but if the US agreed to sign this code it would be the first step in this direction. And then first of all the United States, Russia, then China and the European Union should start negotiations about arms control in space. But the code of conduct is the first step.
Frank Rose announced that the US wants transparency and equality in monitoring space arms but who is going to watch over the process?
I think that the main organization for control of space is the UN and now the UN has enough facilities for this control and only in the fabric of the UN world community may achieve equality in this field.
It seems that Obama is determined to continue his course of cooperating with Russia, and is eager to take further steps towards global peace and stability. Now much depends on the ratification of START by the Senate, this will show us how far the US government is ready to take this matter.