A new U.S.-Russian nuclear arms agreement to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is a month overdue and will take another couple of weeks at least to complete. Most of the 100+ page document is already agreed to in principle, including the headline numbers.
Daryl Kimball , the head of the
Arms Control Association , predicts those numbers will be 1,600 deployed strategic warheads each, and 650-750 delivery vehicles - somewhere in the middle of the ranges laid down by Obama and Medvedev last July. In related news,
John Issacs , executive director of the
Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation , puts the one-month delay in release of the
Nuclear Posture Review into context, in a
Nukes of Hazard blog post: "Dear readers," he writes, "it might just be possible that a delay is simply that, a delay. A failure to meet a deadline. A bureaucracy that could not get its act together. An unprecedented act in Washington, DC."