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 | Saturday, April 15, 2000, updated at 13:49(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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Russia Ready to Cut Nuclear Warheads to 1,500: PutinRussia is ready to cut down its strategic stockpile of nuclear warheads to 1,500 instead of the formerly proposed level of 2,000-2,500, announced Russian President-elect Vladimir Putin on Friday after the State Duma ratified the START-II treaty in Moscow.Russia is ready to reduce its strategic offensive armaments " naturally on a mutual basis with the United States, to a lower level than the one provided by the 1997 Helsinki understanding," Putin's press service said in an official statement. The ratification of START-II opens the door to the launch of official talks on the further cutting of Russian and American strategic offensive armaments in the framework of START-II, it said. After Friday's Duma session, First Deputy Chief of Russia's General Staff Colonel General Valery Manilov also said Russia is ready to reduce its nuclear arsenal "drastically." In recent decades, "the very criteria have changed of what is unacceptable damage that nuclear weapons can do," he said. Friday's ratification by Russia's lower house of parliament of the START-II "demonstrates Russia's good will to create a nuclear- free world and opens for all nuclear countries the way for further act in accordance with the vector of reason," Manilov said. He said ratifying a future START-III "would create a practical platform for beginning a multilateral process of comprehensive reduction and destruction of nuclear weapons with the involvement of all nuclear and threshold states and countries possessing a practical potential for creating nuclear weapons."
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