The decision of President Obama's new administration in early 2009 to ‘press the reset button’ on the American relationship with Russia represents a major change in US policy. There are signs that it is being followed by a change in UK policy and in NATO policy as well. The US change was announced in February 2009 by Vice-President Biden at the annual strategic conference in Munich. Two years before, President Putin's speech at the same conference had warned that US plans ‘to expand certain elements of the anti-missile defence system to Europe cannot help but disturb us. Who needs the next step of what would be, in this case, an inevitable arms race?’ When the President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, met with President Obama in London around the G20 Financial Summit meeting, it was agreed to draft a treaty on reducing both countries' nuclear stockpiles at an accelerated rate in the hope that it could be signed by the two Presidents in the summer of 2009 and ratified by both countries' legislatures before the existing START lapses, after 15 years, in December 2009. That treaty, which was signed by President George H. W. Bush in 1991 before the collapse of the Soviet Union, came into force in 1994 and required both sides to reduce their arsenals to 6,000 warheads. The less binding deal agreed by George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2002 will form the basis for any new deal.