Washington — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will meet with more than 350 top-level decisionmakers from across the globe at the 47th Munich Security Conference February 4–6.
Clinton is expected to make major speeches on security issues such as limiting theater nuclear warheads and will quite likely include remarks on events unfolding in Egypt. National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon is also attending the annual security conference.
On February 5, Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will exchange instruments of ratification for the New START treaty, according to State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. Once the exchange occurs, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty enters into force.
The treaty reduces the two nations’ nuclear arsenals to 1,550 nuclear warheads each in seven years. The United States and Russia hold 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world.
The treaty was signed April 8, 2010, by President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Prague. It is a centerpiece of Obama’s foreign policy program and reflects his broader world view. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to foster arms control and nuclear nonproliferation worldwide.
“This is the most significant arms control agreement in nearly two decades,” Obama said after the U.S. Senate voted in favor of the treaty. “And it will make us safer.”
The U.S. Senate approved ratification December 22 and Russia’s parliament gave its final approval in January. Obama signed ratification documents February 2.
In a prepared statement February 1, Crowley said that “a responsible partnership between the world’s two largest nuclear powers to limit our nuclear arsenals while maintaining strategic stability is imperative to promoting global security. With New START, the United States and Russia have reached another milestone in our bilateral relationship and continue the momentum Presidents Obama and Medvedev created with the ‘reset’ nearly two years ago.”
NEW SECURITY CHALLENGES
Delegates attending the three-day security conference are expected to discuss a range of international security challenges, from the economic crisis to cyberwar. Much of the agenda will focus on cybersecurity, disarmament and nuclear nonproliferation, and the economic crisis and its security implications.
Conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger said in late January that this year’s conference of international policymakers is a milestone on the way to a new and comprehensive Euro-Atlantic security community.
“I have high hopes for us to be able to show that the course has been set towards cooperation and the use of new opportunities so that we may design a coherent and even more comprehensive security community based on the results of the [2010] Lisbon NATO summit,” Ischinger said in a news interview January 21.
The security conference was founded in 1962 as the Wehrkunde Conference by German publisher Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin, who was succeeded in 1999 by Horst Teltschik, the former vice-head of the German Chancellery. Ischinger, a German diplomat, became chairman in 2009.
- Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State.
No comments:
Post a Comment