Russia said Wednesday that it would agree to slash its nuclear arsenal to match proposed US cuts as long as the reductions took the form of a binding legal treaty.
The agreement must take the form of "a binding legal document that forsees radical, real, and verifiable reductions of strategic offensive weapons, up to the ceiling of 1,700 to 2,200 nuclear warheads 10 years from now," the foreign ministry said in a statement.
US President George W. Bush has proposed to cut the US nuclear arsenal from around 6,000 warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200, while Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously said he was prepared to slash the Russian nuclear arsenal to 1,500 warheads.
(China Daily January 31, 2002)
