On the back of their recent atomic arms reduction accord, the United States and Russia urged all UN member states Monday to follow their lead with further progress towards nuclear disarmament.

US and Russian envoys made the appeal at a UN General Assembly debate on disarmament and world security at which UN chief Ban Ki-moon also issued a strong plea for shifting global resources from weaponry to development.

Poles shed the last of their public tears at President Lech Kaczynski’s funeral yesterday. It was a grand affair but, because of volcanic ash, not quite as grand as expected. Dozens of leaders, including Barack Obama, had planned to come and subtly transform the occasion into a kind of 19th-century Congress of Europe: an informal stock-taking, a first tentative appraisal of what is now East and what is now West.

In late February Washington played host to the fourth and final Group of Experts seminar on NATO’s New Strategic Concept. The resulting recommendations will now work their way through the Alliance, and the process will eventually yield a document second in importance only to the Washington Treaty. Though the story has been only marginally covered in the media, internally the exercise has been accompanied by a sense of urgency born of the realization that NATO faces a serious identity crisis. Nowhere does this reverberate more than in Central Europe, where the “new allies” regard the continued ability of NATO to provide for common defense as key to their security.

It is no secret that I have become quite pessimistic about the track of U.S.-Russia relations in recent years. Therefore, I was quite pleasantly surprised to leave Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns’s address today at the Center for American Progress (CAP) with a much more optimistic feeling. Burns pointed out that the tide of anti-American sentiment that was washing over Russian public opinion appears to have been reversed by the change in tone brought about by the Obama administration’s “reset.” However, he acknowledged that the momentum, although positive, must be sustained; the progress that has been made in reversing the slide to the “new Cold War” is real but tentative.

In a strange twist of Cold War enmity on the melt, uranium from what once were Russian nuclear warheads is used to heat and light American homes, thanks to the Megatons to Megawatts Program - a successful example of nuclear non-proliferation.

The 20-year agreement was signed back in 1994 between Russia and the US.

The United States and Russia have moved far beyond the fierce, high-stakes hostility that characterized the Cold War years. But in recent years, relations between the two governments have often been irritable and uncooperative. So it's a pleasant surprise to find President Barack Obama and President Dmitry Medvedev reaching accord on a plan for reducing their nuclear arsenals.

Being able to work with the Russians on this issue may be good practice for addressing other ones, such as Iran and North Korea. Thawing the chill in relations that took place under President George W. Bush is a good step toward finding common ground instead of reasons to bicker.

Russia warned the United States on Tuesday that putting conventional warheads on long-range missiles would jeopardize President Barack Obama's vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Two days before Obama is to sign a landmark nuclear arms reduction pact with President Dmitry Medvedev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also repeated Moscow's threat to withdraw from the treaty if U.S. missile defense plans threatened Russia.

During the most contentious moments of the U.S.-Russian negotiations over a new nuclear treaty, it often seemed as if Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were working at cross purposes.

Putin would make some public statements, usually about U.S. missile defense plans, that seemed to go far beyond what Medvedev and President Obama were saying publicly about how the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty would deal with the issue, leading to the view in Washington that Putin was playing the role of the spoiler.

As Russia mourns those killed in the Moscow subway bombing terrorist attacks this week, its leaders are considering how to respond. One thing they should realize: Brutal tactics against terrorists in the North Caucasus region – the suspected origin of the subway suicide bombers – are not working.

Most Russians outside the region have regarded the iron-fisted strategy of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as effective. When he was president, Mr. Putin headed a war with Chechnya, the second in five years, to put down separatist rebels in this volatile, mostly Muslim republic on Russia’s southern flank.

The good news is that the U.S. and Russia agreed on March 26 to significant cuts in their active long-range nuclear arsenals. The bad news remains the same: if they were to fire even a portion of their remaining arsenals at each other, over a matter of minutes you, your family and every person on this planet would face death by atomic fireball, radiation poisoning or eventual starvation from the ensuing nuclear winter.