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07-03-09 Russians push for global disarmament talks

Russia’s foreign minister called Saturday for an end to a decade of failure in global disarmament talks,seeking to build on an upbeat meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.Sergey Lavrov said a stalemate at the Conference on Disarmament on issues from atomic bombs to space weapons can be broken now that the U.S. administration is “in favor of multilateral approaches to the maintenance of international security and disarmament.” “The right moment has come today,for the first time after the end of the Cold War,for making real progress in resuming the global disarmament process on a broad agenda,” Lavrov told the 65-nation body.The conference has failed to produce anything of substance since completing the nuclear weapons test-ban treaty in the mid-1990s.Confidence in the body was shattered in the early years of George W. Bush’s administration,when the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and from six years of talks on a biological weapons ban.Lavrov’s tone was markedly different from his last appearance here a year ago,when Russia joined China in challenging the U.S. to eliminate space arms,including defensive shields,and largely ignored Washington’s call for all countries to halt production on the fissile material needed for making atomic bombs