New strategic arms treaty to have indirect impact on Bulgaria
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The new Russia-U.S. strategic arms reduction pact to be signed on Thursday in Prague would have an indirect impact on Bulgaria, a security expert in the country said Tuesday.
"Nuclear weapons were never based on Bulgarian territory and therefore Bulgaria, unlike countries such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other former Soviet republics, have never been part of the agreements on nuclear weapons," said Konstantin Zografov, a former defense officer and member of the Bulgarian delegation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
However, Zografov said nuclear weapons pacts would affect the country in an indirect way.
"On one hand, the pacts for strategic nuclear weapons affect the agreements on conventional weapons and these agreements always become a bargaining chip to achieve better conditions when signing pacts for strategic nuclear weapons," Zografov said.
Bulgaria, as a country-participant in European security measures as well as in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, was influenced by the strategic arms reduction pact, he said.
On the other hand, according to Zografov, the deployment of a European missile shield is one of the factors that will be used in the terms of the strategic arms reduction pacts.
"We can say that it has been already used as a bargaining chip to exit the pact in case of necessity," he said. Indirectly, this impact might affect Bulgaria, but of course it was not a direct influence, the expert told Xinhua.
Regarding the relation between nuclear arms reduction and the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces, Zografov said there was not a direct quantitative dependency between nuclear and conventional weapons.
Zografov said less nuclear weapons did not mean there were more conventional ones. "This dependency is always indirect because neither conventional arms nor nuclear weapons are supposed to be used alone," he said.
"There is a two-way dependency," Zografov said. "First, conventional arms are used to balance the strategic arms agreements, and vice versa; And second, security is always achieved through the balance of these two components."
