START Agreement

Amb. ROBERT GREY, via Kevin Davis
Available for a limited number of interviews, Grey is former U.S. Representative to the Conference on Disarmament. He is now director of the Bipartisan Security Group, a project of the Global Security Institute.

ALICE SLATER

Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Slater recently wrote the piece "NATO Goes Anti-Nuclear?"

She said today: "It's wonderful that they finally reached this agreement to cut their nuclear arsenals, which had turned into a real cliffhanger as to whether the deal would get done. What has been holding things up is that Russia feels very threatened by U.S. plans to ring central Europe with missile defenses. Bush walked out on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty -- Clinton had started to violate it when he broke ground for missile defenses in Alaska. Russia had wanted to cut the nuclear bomb arsenals further under Putin which would have enabled us to call all the parties to the table to negotiate for their abolition, but no agreement was reached -- with the U.S. insisting on having its so-called missile defense systems and plans to dominate space. The U.S. and Russia have about 23,000 nuclear weapons. All the other countries combined have about 1,000. We're not going to make progress unless the U.S. and Russia make more substantial cuts."