"The ABM Treaty has been the cornerstone in ensuring strategic stability and will remain so. It can provide the basis for improving the international security architecture," military-diplomatic sources told Interfax on Wednesday.

"This document paves the way for the reduction of strategic offensive weapons not only by Russia and the United States, but by other nuclear powers as well," the sources said.

Russia and the United States maintain strategic nuclear forces "in quantities that are too high. This poses a serious security threat to the two countries and overall global stability."

If Russia and the United States cut their strategic arsenals to around 2,000 warheads each, as announced by the two countries' leaders in Washington, "this level would guarantee the nuclear deterrence process," they added.

The sources opposed U.S. proposals for discarding the existing agreements in strategic offensive arms reduction. "Implementation of these initiatives may entail a crisis for the overall non-proliferation regime of weapons of mass destruction," they stressed.

Commenting on the U.S. intention to breach the 1972 ABM Treaty, the sources stressed that "Moscow considered the U.S. side's justification for deploying a national missile defense as unrealistic and groundless."

Meanwhile, The Russian Defense Ministry has sharply criticized the U.S. position that nuclear arsenals could be reduced in keeping with unilateral announcements while a pertinent base of agreements and laws has not been adopted.

Washington's proposal to swiftly reduce nuclear stockpiles in compliance with unilateral statements and declarations of intention fails to guarantee the proclaimed levels of reduction and control, head of the Defense Ministry's Main Department of International Military Cooperation, Vice Admiral Valentin Kuznetsov, told journalists on Wednesday.

Now that the new U.S. administration has altered its foreign policy priorities, previous commitments won't be honored.

The September 11 events proved that hundreds of thousands of people face other threats than "intercontinental ballistic missiles, against which the United States plans to deploy a multi-level missile defense system," he said. The threats are posed by small extremist groups resorting to means "beyond the protection of the national missile defense," he said.

In other ABM news a Russian arms expert said Wednesday that U.S. would be unable to deploy missile defense for at least another six years. "At present, the Americans have nothing to deploy. Research and development and tests of missile defense elements will take them at least 5 or 6 years," Sergei Rogov, director of the U.S. and Canadian Studies Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told journalists on Wednesday in Moscow.

Rogov described as a political game the United States' intention to unilaterally withdraw from the 1972 ABM Treaty in November 2001.

The failure of the United States "to implement its promise of withdrawing from the Treaty and its decision to remain within its framework is very important. It is our first small victory," he said.

Asked about Washington's proposal to discard the START Treaty control and verification mechanisms, Rogov replied that this position was "pretentious." Russia "won't accept it," he noted.

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