Hopes for nuclear breakthrough on Obama Moscow trip

By Michael Stott

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Hopes are rising on both sides that President Barack Obama's visit to Moscow next week will produce a breakthrough in talks on cutting U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons and on helping Washington in Afghanistan.

Officially, neither side has made an announcement but diplomats believe Obama will agree with President Dmitry Medvedev on the outline of a deal to reduce the stocks of deployed nuclear warheads to below 1,700 on each side.

"We are confident that we will secure an agreement committing both sides to cutting warheads to fewer than 1,700," one person close to the talks said.

Obama and Medvedev gave the go-ahead to talks on a new strategic arms treaty to replace START-1, which expires on December 5, when they met for the first time in London in April.

Sergei Ryabkov, a Russian deputy foreign minister, said on Tuesday that progress in the arms talks had been "beyond what was expected when we started."

By December, Ryabkov told the state-run RIA news agency, he expected a "solid document with a range of measures for testing and exchange of information...and real reductions in strategic offensive weapons."

Estimates of current nuclear stockpiles differ but according to the U.S.-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the start of 2009 the United States had around 2,200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads and Russia around 2,790.

Washington is also optimistic of securing Moscow's agreement to ship lethal military supplies to its troops in Afghanistan across Russian territory -- an urgent priority as existing supply lines across Pakistan become less safe.

Diplomats say the two agreements are likely to be the main fruits of Obama's July 6-8 trip to Russia and will be touted as evidence that both sides want to "press the reset button" -- to use Washington's phrase -- on their rocky relations of recent years.

Relations between Russia and the United States hit their lowest point since the end of the Cold War last summer over a war in U.S. ally and former Soviet republic Georgia.

Russia's decision to send troops and amour deep into neighboring Georgia in response to Tbilisi's attack on a Russian-supported rebel region angered Washington and led to a suspension of NATO cooperation with Moscow -- now lifted.

Both sides are now trying to put that behind them to make progress on nuclear disarmament and other areas -- such as strengthening efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons -- where they see a chance of relatively quick agreement.

HOST OF DIFFERENCES PERSIST

But analysts warn that any prospective deals could yet be torpedoed by a host of differences between Moscow and Washington.

The two sides are far apart on U.S. plans to station an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, something Russia says threatens its security.