Both countries hope the next U.S. president will be "ready for major mutually acceptable decisions with Russia in the interests of strengthening international security," Russia's Foreign Ministry has said.

The hopes were voiced at a recent meeting between Russian and U.S. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Bill Clinton in Brunei, the ministry said in a release obtained by Interfax.

During the meeting, Russia said it is ready "to move without any delays jointly or simultaneously with the United States to upper limits of 1,500 nuclear charges or less on the basis of existing cornerstone Russian-American agreements on strategic offensive armaments and missile defenses," the release said.

Clinton "reacted in an interested way to the ideas that were put before him, instructing his experts to study them carefully and within a short period," it said.

The Russian-U.S. summit in Brunei was an "important stage" in the international discussion of a November 13 initiative by Putin for new drastic cuts in strategic offensive armaments as a condition for preserving and consolidating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the ministry said.

"Positive responses that are coming in are evidence of a great interest that the timely proposals of the Russian leadership have evoked in the world," the release said.

Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief of Russia's Strategic Missile Forces, Army Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev, has said that the scale of the his forces' reform will depend on progress of Russian- U.S. talks on the reduction of strategic offensive weapons.

"Absolutely, the Strategic Missile Forces will be reorganized, but the scale of that process will depend on how and in what way we progress in the talks with the United States on the reduction of strategic offensive weapons," Yakovlev said Thursday.

Several options for the reform have been presented to the Russian administration, he said. "They are being evaluated by experts, and the choice of the final variant is up to the president."

"Russia will have the nuclear shield anyway," Yakovlev continued. "Recent statements by [President] Vladimir Putin show that the nuclear forces are the top instrument in the maintenance of strategic stability."

"One peculiarity of nuclear weaponry is such that the nuclear security principle must be observed even if they are taken out of service," Yakovlev said. "At first it is necessary to secure the nuclear weapons, then they can be taken out of service, and only after that can the personnel be disbanded."

It is planned that the Strategic Missile Forces will be cut by 60,000 men by 2006, as per a resolution by the country's Security Council. Five Topol-M missile systems are slated to be put in service in Tatishchevo in the Saratov region by the end of this year, Yakovlev replied to an Interfax question. "However, we may fail to do that because of financial problems," he said.

Asked whether Russia can maintain nuclear parity with the United States after 2007 (when the service life of the majority of Russia's RS- 20 and RS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads expires), if Washington does not accept Moscow's proposal for reducing both sides' number of nuclear warheads to 1,500, Yakovlev said, "there are variants for maintaining parity, and they depend on a decision concerning financing and the structure of the armed forces."

In other news, Russia's defense minister said Nuclear arsenals cannot be cut unless the ABM treaty is in place.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposal that Russia and the United States both reduce their nuclear arsenals to below 1,500 warheads apiece is a non-starter unless the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 is in place, Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev told the press in Tver on Wednesday.

"Nobody can have an advantage in this [the nuclear] field," Sergeyev said. China, France and Britain must join the reduction of strategic offensive weapons at a later stage, he said.

Putin had made the proposal on the eve of his trip to Mongolia and Brunei.

Copyright 2000 Interfax. All rights reserved. The material on this page is provided by Interfax and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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