Nuclear Disputes to Top Bush-Putin Meeting

WASHINGTON - President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin were to meet at the White House on Friday with two of the world's most intractable nuclear disputes — Iran and North Korea — crowding a thinned agenda.

The session, scaled back after Hurricane Katrina forced Putin to compress a longer U.S. visit, was expected to run barely two hours, including a working lunch. Both leaders planned brief public statements afterward.

Iran tops the list. Bush wants Russia to back European efforts to haul Tehran before the U.N. Security Council over a nuclear program Washington believes is aimed at weapons. Putin, whose country is building Iran's first nuclear power reactor at Bushehr, has resisted sanctions and insists there is no proof of a weapons program.

"We have a shared interest in seeing that Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon," a senior administration official said, "and honest differences about how to get there."

North Korea presents a mirror image. Beijing's six-party talks have stalled over Pyongyang's demand for a civilian reactor, and U.S. officials want Moscow — a party to the talks — to press the North. Russia has said only that the North should return to the nonproliferation treaty.

The two presidents were also expected to discuss Russia's WTO bid, counterterrorism cooperation and the war in Iraq, which Putin opposed.

Democracy was once near the top of the meeting agenda, after Bush publicly urged Putin to reverse what Washington calls the Kremlin's centralization of power. U.S. officials say the subject still comes up, though with less heat than a year ago.

The meeting was Bush's first with Putin since their June encounter in Moscow. It came a day after Bush's nationally televised Katrina address and amid the president's worst polling stretch, which analysts say has trimmed his leverage with foreign leaders.

Putin was scheduled to travel afterward to New York, where he joined more than 150 leaders at the U.N. summit marking the organization's 60th anniversary.