Moscow: Russia and the United States will sign a deal on Tuesday on reducing stocks of weapons-grade plutonium, officials in both nations said.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Russia foreign minister Sergei Lavrov will sign a protocol to a 2000 agreement on eliminating excess weapons-grade plutonium from defence programs, the State Department said.
US officials have said each country is to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium by burning it in reactors.
Gary Samore, a senior adviser to US president Barack Obama, said on Friday the deal “is very significant in the sense that over a period of a decade or so it will remove very large quantities of weapons-useable materials, and also it’s an agreement that’s been long stalled.”
The 2000 deal has not entered force due to delays on both sides.
“It was really president Obama’s focus on this issue and the reset of his relationship with Russia that has finally been able to finalize this agreement,” Samore said.
The planned signing during a global nuclear security summit comes after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Obama signed the ”New START” treaty committing the Cold War foes to reducing their deployed nuclear arsenals.
The deal will provide for the United States to spend up to $400 million to transform the Russian plutonium involved, said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard University.
The process would involve taking plutonium that is “ready to be put right into a weapon” and “putting it in a much more secure form for decades to come,” Bunn said on Friday.
He said US critics question the deal because reactors used for the Russian plutonium could potentially be remodified to produce new weapons-grade plutonium.
Medvedev arrived in Washington on Monday for a two-day nuclear security summit that Obama is hosting as part of his push to reduce threats from nuclear weapons and materials.
—Agencies