Clinton won the pledge from Belarus Foreign Minister Sergei Martynov after talks on the sidelines of the OSCE summit in the Kazakhstan capital Astana.

"Foreign Minister Martynov announced that Belarus has decided to eliminate all of its stocks of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and intends to do so by the next nuclear security summit in 2012," said a joint statement.

"The United States intends to provide technical and financial assistance to support the completion of this effort as expeditiously as possible."

In highly-enriched form, uranium can be used to form the warhead of a nuclear bomb and there have been fears over the security of the stocks held by ex-Soviet states like Belarus.

Clinton was quoted as praising the decision "as a sign of progress in efforts to advance nuclear security and nonproliferation" and said Belarus would be invited to the 2012 nuclear security summit in South Korea.

Belarus' strongman President Alexander Lukashenko had been quoted as saying earlier this year that the country had hundreds of kilogrammes of highly-enriched uranium and had no intention of eliminating it.

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