MOSCOW - The United States and Russia missed their deadline yesterday to adopt a new arms control treaty, though they pledged that they would generally abide by the old one while they continue negotiating.
The sides were stepping up talks in Geneva in hopes of shortly concluding the agreement, which would cut the world’s largest nuclear arsenals by up to a third. The Cold War-era pact, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991, known as START, expires early today.
Neither side blamed the other for the delay, which was apparently caused in part by an abundance of highly technical matters that need to be addressed. Negotiators have been focusing this week on issues related to monitoring and verification.
In a joint statement, the White House and Kremlin declared their “commitment, as a matter of principle, to continue to work together in the spirit of the START treaty following its expiration, as well as our firm intention to ensure that a new treaty on strategic arms enters into force at the earliest possible date.’’
Yesterday, President Obama discussed progress on the treaty with Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov in Brussels.
While both sides said they would essentially honor the old treaty after the deadline, one major change was clear: An American monitoring post in Russia that kept track of Russian missile production was closed yesterday.
The post, in the city of Votkinsk, 600 miles east of Moscow, was authorized under the old treaty, and Russia had blocked any effort to keep it under the new one or to provide for a temporary extension.
The outlines of the new treaty are apparent. At a summit in July, Obama and Medvedev narrowed the range for a cap on warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675, down from about 2,200 each side has now. The countries are also expected to lower the ceiling on delivery vehicles - intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based missiles, and strategic bombers - to below 800, from 1,600.
In Washington yesterday, Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said that after the deadline, the United States and Russia “will simply maintain where the agreement has been for the last 15 or 20 years’’ until a new treaty is approved.
A senior American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said negotiators “are focusing on getting final issues solved’’ and expressed optimism that a treaty would be completed in the coming days.
