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Mar. 1st (BBC News) - US President Barack Obama is planning "dramatic reductions" in the country's nuclear arsenal, a senior US administration official has said.
This would come as part of a sweeping policy review designed to prevent the spread of atomic weapons, he said.
He added that the new strategy will point to a greater role for conventional weapons.
Mr Obama is to meet his Defence Secretary Robert Gates later on Monday to discuss the new nuclear strategy.
The review "will point to dramatic reductions in the stockpile, while maintaining a strong and reliable deterrent through the investments that have been made in the budget," the official said.
He said the review would go further than previous reviews in "embracing the aims of non-proliferation. "
Officials say thousands of nuclear weapons could be cut, in many cases by retiring weapons that are now kept in storage.
The new strategy will also seek to abandon plans put in place by the previous administration to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons for penetrating underground targets known as "bunker busters."
The officials say the strategy will be an important step towards Mr Obama's declared aim of reversing the spread of nuclear weapons and seeking a world without them.
Last April, Mr Obama outlined his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons in a major speech in the Czech capital Prague.
He spoke of putting an end to Cold War thinking, a process in which, he insisted, the US was morally obliged to play a leading role.
He called for the forging of new partnerships to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and a global summit on nuclear security, which will take place next month.
Ahead of the summit, the Obama administration began a wide-ranging nuclear policy review, which was initially supposed to have been released in December.
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