NEW YORK - President Barack Obama will decide whether to deploy a new class of weapons capable of reaching anywhere on Earth from the United States in less than an hour, The New York Times reported Friday. The new weapons system is designed to hurl a conventional warhead of enormous weight at high speed and with pinpoint accuracy, without crossing the nuclear threshold, the newspaper said in a front page report. Yet even now, concerns about the technology are so strong that the Obama administration has acceded to a demand by Russia that the United States decommission one nuclear missile for every one of these new conventional weapons fielded by the Pentagon, it said. That provision, the White House said, is buried deep inside the new START treaty that Obama and President Dmitri Medvedev signed two weeks ago in Prague. Called Prompt Global Strike, the new weapon, according to the report, is designed to carry out tasks such as picking off Osama bin Laden in a cave, if the right one could be found; taking out a North Korean missile while it is being rolled to the launching pad; or destroying an Iranian nuclear site - all without crossing the nuclear threshold. In theory, the weapon will hurl a conventional warhead of enormous weight at high speed and with pinpoint accuracy, generating the localized destructive power of a nuclear warhead. The idea is not new: President George W. Bush and his staff promoted the technology, imagining that this new generation of conventional weapons would replace nuclear warheads on submarines, it said. In face-to-face meetings with Bush, Russian leaders complained that the technology could increase the risk of a nuclear war because Russia would not know if the missiles carried nuclear warheads or conventional ones. Bush and his aides concluded that the Russians were right. Partly as a result, the idea really hadnt gone anywhere in the Bush administration, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who has served both presidents, said recently on ABCs This Week. But he added that it was embraced by the new administration. Obama alluded to the concept in a recent interview, saying it was part of an effort to move towards less emphasis on nuclear weapons while ensuring that our conventional weapons capability is an effective deterrent in all but the most extreme circumstances.