Hard Bargaining Still Ahead on Arms Issues

The new U.S. and Russian arms initiatives represent a breathtaking acceleration of efforts to curb nuclear weapons but contain significant differences that will require hard bargaining despite the warming post-Cold War climate.

Most important, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin did not agree to the key condition in President Bush’s initiative: eliminating multiple warheads from land-based missiles. He didn’t even use the words, or their rough acronym, MIRV, in his speech.

Instead, he largely rehashed previous Soviet actions and suggested deeper cuts in the total arsenal of offensive nuclear weapons each side can possess--to between 2,000 and 2,500, compared to the 3,000 to 3,600 implicit in Bush’s proposal. Each side currently has more than 12,000 long-range warheads and bombs.

The White House maintained that Yeltsin’s address “sets the stage for very productive talks” on Saturday with President Bush at Camp David, Md. The Russian leader may also expand on his position in a U.N. appearance Friday.

Even so, his speech Wednesday was disappointing to many in the Administration. Russia is still willing to discuss changes in the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, Yeltsin said, but if the treaty were modified to allow creation of a missile defense system, Russia wants to share fully in U.S. know-how to develop and build a world-wide network.

“We are prepared to design jointly, produce jointly, and use jointly a global security system to replace the SDI system,” he said referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” as the U.S. space-based anti-missile program is known. Other Russians have said such a system should be run by the United Nations.

Yeltsin’s words suggest that while willing to discuss ABM changes, he intends to resist U.S. efforts to modify the treaty to allow a defense system that would protect only the United States.

The proposal is clearly a non-starter for the United States. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has said that former President Ronald Reagan’s offer to share such U.S. secrets no longer applies.

So the question now is whether Bush and Yeltsin can overcome obstacles the way that Reagan, Bush and former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev did in earlier negotiations.

With their addresses this week, both Bush and Yeltsin seem determined to seek a broad, high-level agreement on nuclear arms, as opposed to the snail-paced, lower-level negotiations that characterized past arms talks, according to Edward L. Warner III, a senior analyst at RAND Corp.

Some Pentagon officials are impatient with the very idea of negotiating with the crippled republics that make up the former Soviet Union. They argue that Russia is in no position to oppose U.S. moves, and if Moscow does resist U.S. desires such as building missile defenses, Washington should ignore it or even abrogate the 1972 ABM treaty outright.

From the left, however, come arguments for greater sympathy for Russia and the other former republics with nuclear weapons.

“We should recognize that in order to influence Russia and the others, to help shape the future, we must treat them as allies rather than enemies,” said the Brookings Institution’s John Steinbrunner. The United States must not provoke their military “as it goes through tremendous reductions and upheavals,” he said.

A quick, broad agreement would not address verification issues, once considered so crucial to prevent Soviet cheating. Instead, verification language would be adopted wholesale from the pending Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

The Administration wants the START pact ratified by the Soviet successor states and the U.S. Congress before July, when the U.S. presidential election season begins in earnest. Any new agreement on warheads would then be added to the START treaty, with the verification and other safeguards applied to the new limits.

The proposed new ceilings would roughly cut in half the limits set only last July in the START agreement, which mandated a one-third cut in existing arsenals. The reductions agreed to in July were to have taken seven years to complete, but the prospective new agreement may well accelerate the timetable to the even lower ceilings.

Yeltsin’s proposed new ceiling on warheads also has political significance for the Russian leader because it is lower than the 3,000-warhead limit proposed by Gorbachev. Some experts have suggested that Yeltsin wants to be able to claim he sought a better deal than Gorbachev.

But experts also said it is not surprising that he adroitly sidestepped Bush’s proposal on multiple-warhead missiles. The U.S. proposal would require deepest cuts into the newest and best Soviet weapons, the huge silo-based SS-18s, while the premier U.S. weapons, submarine-based multi-warhead missiles, would not be cut as severely.

“Bush sweetened the proposal Tuesday by offering to cut about a third from its submarine missile force and to accept some limitations on the power of its warheads,” said Jack Mendelsohn, deputy director of the private Arms Control Assn. “But it still means taking down the principal Soviet system while leaving the principal U.S. system largely intact.”

Yeltsin’s goal this weekend could be to get an agreement that would set a new numerical ceiling, presumably a compromise between the levels he and Bush advanced this week, but without dictating which weapons must be cut, Mendelsohn said. Some Soviet multi-warhead missiles would have to be cut, but not as many as required by the U.S. proposal.

Despite the differences, arms specialists here agreed that the Administration has taken another bold leap forward, as it did in Bush’s September initiative in eliminating most short-range nuclear weapons. And now, as then, the powers in Moscow are following suit.

“Even last fall the Administration was not prepared to consider cuts below the 6,000-warhead START levels for some years to come,” said RAND’s Warner. “But now, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and economic difficulties at home, it’s offering to go down by another half. That is big news.”