“It is high time to hold a meaningful dialogue between NATO and Russia on nuclear issues in general, and on tactical nuclear weapons in particular,” Poland's foreign minister Radek Sikorski and his Norwegian counterpart Jonas Gahr Store express in a jointly-written article in the New York Times.
The NATO two-day summit which begins in Chicago next weekend will be attended by 51 countries' leaders, including those from the Polish government, including President Bronislaw Komorowski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk, France's newly-elected Francois Hollande, Germany's Angela Merkel, David Cameron from the UK and will be hosted by President Barack Obama.
Russia's Vladimir Putin will not attend but will send a high-level delegation to observe proceedings.
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has called the summit the “biggest in NATO's history” and will focus on three main themes: defining goals from 2014 onwards; “building security in a time of austerity”,and strengthening NATO's “global network of partners”, says the alliance's leader.
Polish and Norwegian foreign ministers call for NATO to honour its “goal of creating conditions for a world without nuclear weapons” which it made at the Lisbon summit in 2010.
“Tactical nuclear weapons are not covered by any existing arms control regimes. Thus, over two decades after the Cold War ended, thousands of tactical nuclear weapons remain in Europe,” write Radek Sikorski and Jonas Gahr Store in the NYT.
“We have still not managed to establish any credible system of accounting for these weapons. We do not know the exact size of the U.S. and Russian arsenals, nor are we certain of their storage locations,” they add.
NATO's policy from 2014 must “facilitate a serious and constructive nuclear weapons dialogue with Russia.”
Russia's newly elected president Vladimir Putin will not be pleased, however, with Anders Fogh Rasmussen comments in the The Wall Street Journal which states that the plan for a missile-shield in Europe is to go ahead.
"[The] interim capability [of the new missile shield] will provide the alliance with a limited but operationally meaningful and immediately available capability against a ballistic-missile threat," he writes, Monday.
"It is the first step, but a real step, toward providing full coverage for all NATO populations, territory and forces in Europe, " he adds.
"Turkey, Romania, Poland and Spain have all agreed to host U.S. assets. I expect more announcements in the months and years ahead, " the NATO leader writes.
Russian Chief of Staff Gen. Nikolai Makarov said last week however that it may station short-range Iskander missiles in its Kaliningrad enclave near Poland, if the planned missile shield went ahead. (pg)