PERSPECTIVE ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS : To Bolster Yeltsin, Stop U.S. Testing : It only strengthens the hard-line military Establishment and destabilizes the democratic movement.

A nuclear-weapons explosion shook buildings in Las Vegas on March 26. The political reverberations reached Russian nuclear-weapons laboratories, where leaders jumped for joy.

Each American test gives the Russian military-industrial complex added leverage to force Boris Yeltsin and democrats in the Parliament to end the moratorium on Russian weapons testing. The United States must choose whether Russian democracy or continued nuclear testing is more important.

Democracy in Russia has been closely tied to the ecology movement. By uniting conservative nationalists and liberal greens, the ecology coalition helped give Yeltsin his huge democratic victory at the polls. This coalition profoundly distrusts nuclear technologies. Little wonder--disasters such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Kyshtym in 1957, along with routinely careless radioactive-waste handling, have made the country a “radiation landfill,” in the description of one Russian official.

The ecology movement and its elected representatives intensely oppose resumption of nuclear weapons testing--on environmental grounds and because they see testing as a way for the military-industrial complex to keep an unnecessary arms race alive and avoid the economic conversion the country desperately needs.

As a group, the leaders of the Russian nuclear-weapons complex disdain the democratic Parliament and the anti-nuclear public. The guard has not been changed at the top of this complex: Throughout the coup, the collapse of the Communist Party and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the same group of cold warriors have retained their positions at the top of the bomb-building enterprise.

Indeed, the man who had been responsible for the nuclear-weapons side of the Soviet Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry, Victor Mikhailov, was recently appointed by Yeltsin to head the successor Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy. Mikhailov does not mask his disdain for the democratic process emerging in Russia. Under his influence, Yeltsin recently ordered preparations for two to four underground nuclear tests, in case the United States fails to join the Russian moratorium.

The U.S. testing program constitutes the greatest lever for Russian nuclear-weapons officials. Russian nuclear-complex leaders simply take whatever arguments for testing that the U.S. Establishment is using at the moment and repeat them in Russian. If democratic America continues to test, the argument goes, democratic Russia must test too.

No one argues that the U.S. nuclear deterrent would be jeopardized by a cessation of explosive testing, now that no new weapons are under development. The same confidence does not exist in the future of Russian democracy.

Resumption of nuclear-weapons testing in Russia would shake the environmental movement and show that elected officials still cannot control this complex. The weakness of Russian democracy would be exposed and thereby compounded in the popular psyche.

Washington can pursue a pro-democracy strategy in several ways. The United States could join the Russian moratorium, as 203 members of the House and 30 members of the Senate have proposed in a bill for a nuclear-testing moratorium. France declared a testing moratorium on April 8 and urged the United States to join it, which makes the Bush Administration’s resistance untenable.

Simultaneously or separately, the United States could engage Russia and the other nuclear-weapons states in negotiating a comprehensive test-ban treaty before the 1995 conference to extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. A test ban does not have to be permanent nor prevent some future action to remedy hypothetical problems in deterrent forces; it could be linked to the treaty and subject to the same review and renewal procedures.

When the history of the current moment is written, the technical insights gained from nuclear-weapons tests in Nevada will be a footnote. The bold print will record whether democracy lived or died in Russia.