A Cash-and-Carry Offer for the New Nuclear Republics : Arms control: We should buy up the entire Soviet arsenal before need or greed prompts piecemeal sales elsewhere.

If, in their fragility and turmoil, the splintering Soviet republics don’t think of asking us for massive aid in exchange for dismantling their nuclear arsenals, we should propose such a deal, and soon.

As Administration officials observed in interviews Sunday, central control of the Soviets’ 25,000 to 30,000 nuclear weapons cannot be guaranteed indefinitely. As the political and economic climate deteriorates, the possibility of those weapons’ getting loose grows stronger.

Only the prospect of a substantial payment from the West--much more than the $400 million that we’ve earmarked for nuclear-weapons dismantlement--is likely to induce the republics to swallow the bitter pill of allowing us to do what it takes to accomplish the job adequately and before it’s too late.

Nearly all of the weapons are in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, but remain in the control of a central military authority. As time drags on--as Russia insists on retaining an unspecified number of weapons and as Kazakhstan vows to hold onto its weapons as long as Russia does--the world must hope that the military custodians of the former Soviet arsenal remain stable and faithful to a unified command. But hope is too weak a reed to lean on.

Nuclear weapons are gold in a place of extreme want. Unless they are made unavailable quickly--far more quickly than the 10 years one top Russian official has estimated--it’s likely, and perhaps inevitable, that some, perhaps many, will find their way into the hands of countries or even extra-legal groups that have the money to buy them. There is inventory to match any budget: warheads that sit atop intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombs and mobile tactical weapons--artillery shells, short-range missile warheads and nuclear mines. Worth nothing in the former Soviet Union, each is worth millions, some even hundreds of millions, to Third World dictators. What would Saddam Hussein pay to get just one warhead? Or Iran? Or Syria? Or North Korea?

The possession of a single such weapon would enormously magnify any such country’s military and diplomatic clout. At the least, that country would be capable of bullying as never before, and, should it act aggressively, it would be much more dangerous to fight. Moreover, should that country possess a cadre of scientists and engineers already trying to develop nuclear weapons, the purchase of a finished, sophisticated weapon would provide a superb model for building more.

Can there be any doubt that countries that have already spent billions trying to develop their own nuclear arms would offer mere millions for sophisticated finished weapons? And can there be any doubt that, somewhere in the former Soviet Union, there are hungry, cynical, demoralized or simply enterprising generals, colonels, lab directors or local politicians ready to grab easy millions by unlocking a depot and carting a medium-sized box to the border? Even if payoffs to guards and border policemen were necessary, and even if a few kickbacks had to be paid, millions of dollars can go a long way. Even a few thousand dollars could make a resourceful Kazakh soldier, or a Ukrainian politician who knows where the keys are, richer than anyone he’s ever met.

With so much money chasing a certain commodity, with that commodity in plentiful supply, with access to that commodity increasingly easy, and with persons possessing such access growing more needy by the week, you don’t have to have a degree in economics or human behavior to recognize that, sooner or later, there will be a market in that commodity.

How to stop that market? The only way is to eliminate the commodity. And the only way to do that, and to do it quickly and reliably, is to pay the former Soviet republics large amounts of money for the privilege of doing it for them, either by destroying the weapons on site or, in most cases, by removing them from the republics for secure destruction elsewhere.

Would the republics allow us, in effect, to buy their nuclear weapons? Of course they would. They need the money desperately. They also know the immense value of those weapons: Whereas outside parties would pay fortunes to possess them, the West would pay far greater fortunes to destroy them.

If the republics, particularly Russia, were to ask that we destroy large numbers of our own weapons at the same time as their arsenals are destroyed, that would hardly be an unreasonable, or for us undesirable, request.

For the republics, this is, in financial terms, by far the most advantageous time to make such a deal. Should quantities of nuclear weapons start to leak through their borders, the cat will be out of the bag, and the destruction of the remaining weapons will command a far lower price than the destruction of the intact arsenal would command right now.

If the republics fail to offer us a deal very soon, we ought to offer it, energetically, to them. The security we’d gain would certainly be worth a contribution of several billion dollars in direct aid and credits. That money could buy us real peace of mind far more decisively than any defense outlay many times as large. And it could buy the republics the necessities to keep their people’s despair in check.

Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus would probably allow the West to join them in quickly destroying or removing all of the weapons in their territories in exchange for large amounts of aid. Russia, particularly its military and its most nationalist elements, might not be willing, at any price, to allow the eradication of every last nuclear weapon on Russian soil.

But even if, for a fraction of what we’ve spent to keep our forces in Europe each year, we can be sure that, say, 97% of the nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union no longer exist, and if we can also make sure that any nuclear weapons that remain in Russia are kept under secure control, then the spending of all that money would be more than worthwhile--for us, for the republics and for a world kept safe from the wild dispersion of the most wild things.