Huge Warhead Cuts Approved : Bush, Yeltsin Act to End ‘Nuclear Nightmare’ : Diplomacy: Reductions are the most sweeping of the atomic age. When complete, a massive sneak attack would be impossible. Two-thirds of arsenals would be destroyed within 11 years.

President Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, vowing that their countries will never make war on each other, agreed Tuesday to the most sweeping arms control agreement since the start of the atomic age--the destruction of fully two-thirds of their nuclear arsenals within the next 11 years.

When completely carried out, the pact would leave both superpowers with too few strategic weapons to consider the kind of massive sneak attack that has threatened the world with nuclear holocaust for decades.

“With this agreement, the nuclear nightmare recedes more and more for ourselves, for our children and for our grandchildren,” Bush said as Yeltsin stood at his side in the sun-drenched White House Rose Garden.

For his part, Yeltsin declared: “We shall not fight against each other. This is a solemn undertaking.”

He said that the agreement, which goes substantially beyond even the most optimistic hopes for the summit talks, resulted from “the personal trust and confidence” that he and Bush have established since the collapse of the Soviet Union last December.

At the political level, the arms control pact guarantees the success of the first formal U.S.-Russia summit meeting, which earlier had seemed in danger of being overshadowed by Yeltsin’s seemingly offhand revelation that American prisoners from the Vietnam War had been sent to the Soviet Union and that some may still be alive.

And with both leaders facing severe domestic political problems, Bush and Yeltsin hurried to announce their agreement within hours of striking it.

A senior U.S. official said that Yeltsin apparently learned of the POWs within the last few days from recently opened Soviet archives. The official said that Yeltsin indicated he had no firsthand knowledge of any of the prisoners.

Although the arms agreement requires Russia to make deeper cuts in its arsenal and to eliminate the giant SS-18 missiles that form the heart of the nuclear force it inherited from the Soviet Union, Yeltsin said that the pact was negotiated “without anybody wishing to gain unilateral advantage.”

That was a sharp contrast to Yeltsin’s attitude last week when he accused Washington of trying to build in a permanent superiority.

Bush and Yeltsin plan to sign a declaration today outlining the new agreement that U.S. officials said will be drafted into a formal treaty within the next few months. But the paper to be signed today is exquisitely detailed, containing all of the numbers and timetables to be included in the treaty.

It calls for a reduction in nuclear warheads from about 10,000 today to between 3,000 and 3,500 by the year 2003--sooner if the Russians can afford to destroy weapons that quickly.

The still-unratified Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union last July, set ceilings of about 6,000 warheads for each side. However, because of arcane “counting rules” which discount weapons carried on manned bombers, the United States would have been allowed to keep 8,556 weapons while the Soviet Union, which does not have as large a bomber force, would be limited to 6,449. The new agreement eliminates the bomber discount.

The two presidents also agreed to ban all land-based missiles with multiple warheads. Both sides now deploy such weapons, but they form a more important part of the Russian arsenal than of the American force. In addition, senior U.S. officials said, Yeltsin agreed that Russia would reduce its total nuclear force to 3,000, the low end of the range provided by the agreement, while agreeing that the United States could retain as many as 3,500 warheads.

In addition to agreeing to the ultimate elimination of its SS-18 missiles, the most powerful nuclear weapon deployed anywhere in the world, Yeltsin Press Secretary Vyacheslav V. Kostikov said, Russia will immediately take the weapons off alert. That means that they no longer could be launched on short notice.

One senior U.S. official said that Yeltsin broke the last impasse Tuesday morning, shortly after receiving a pomp-filled welcome to the White House, when he said that Russia would make somewhat deeper cuts than the United States.

The agreement was negotiated in just five months, a sharp contrast to earlier arms control pacts that often took decades to complete.

Unlike the previous pacts, which were hammered out between bitter rival superpowers, this agreement matches two nations that claim to seek permanent peace. Nevertheless, neither power was willing to scrap its weapons unilaterally and leave the other as the world’s only major nuclear nation.

Even after the cuts are complete, the United States and Russia will remain the world’s major nuclear powers. China, Britain and France also have deployed nuclear weapons, and about a dozen countries have either produced weapons clandestinely or are considered capable of doing so.

Richard Perle, a former Pentagon official who once was considered the most hard-line anti-Soviet ideologue in the Reagan administration, said that it would be a mistake for the United States and Russia to cut their nuclear stocks much further.

He said that, if both countries were to scrap all of their nuclear weapons, it would be “hopelessly unstable (because) the first scoundrel to get ahold of an atomic weapon would be able to threaten everyone.”

U.S. officials said the new arms agreement adopts the same verification procedures imposed by the START treaty, thus eliminating long and drawn-out negotiations over ways to prevent cheating.

In the negotiations that preceded the agreement, the top American priority was to eliminate land-based missiles with multiple warheads, which Washington considers to be the most dangerous and destabilizing weapons of the nuclear age.

U.S. officials reason that giant rockets like the SS-18 and the U.S. Peacekeeper--with 10 warheads each--are not only powerful weapons in their own right but make tempting targets for enemy attack. Strategic planners have long worried about the possibility of a “disarming first strike” in which 10-warhead missiles could be knocked out in their silos by one or two incoming warheads. If all missiles have only one warhead, however, there is no such advantage in attacking a silo.

U.S. officials said that multi-warhead missiles are especially dangerous because they could generate a “use it or lose it” philosophy in which a power might decide to fire its missiles under threat of attack.

Early in the negotiations, officials said, Russia agreed to eliminate multiple warheads on land-based missiles only if the United States agreed to eliminate multi-warhead submarine-based missiles.

U.S. officials said that Washington refused to agree to that linkage because sea-based missiles are not so vulnerable to attack and because it would be prohibitively expensive to send $1 billion-a-copy Trident submarines to sea with only a single warhead on each of their 24 missiles.

In the final agreement, Moscow said that it will eliminate land-based multi-warheads while Washington agreed to reduce the number of warheads on each of its sea-based missiles from eight to four.

The United States and Russia agreed to cut their nuclear forces in two steps. The first phase, to be completed by 1999, simply changes the numerical ceilings in the START treaty, which also was to be fully implemented by 1999.

The United States, which was allowed 8,556 warheads in START, would cut back to 4,250. Russia, allowed 6,449 by START, would reduce to 3,800. No more than 1,200 warheads could be on land-based multiple-warhead missiles, and no more than 650 could be on SS-18s. START limited SS-18s to 1,540 warheads.

Both sides would be limited to 2,160 submarine-launched warheads. Under START, the United States would have had 3,456 of those while the Russians would have had only 1,744.

The second phase, calling for the United States to reduce total warheads to 3,500 and Russia to 3,000 is to be completed by 2003. Of those warheads, 1,750 could be carried by submarines. U.S. officials said that the United States intends to deploy all of the permitted submarine warheads, while Russia would probably keep more of its force on land.

Neither power has more than a handful of single-warhead missiles now. U.S. officials said that to comply with the treaty, each side would simply remove all but one warhead from multi-warhead missiles rather than producing new single-warhead weapons.

While the sweeping arms control agreement dominated the first day of the summit, Yeltsin’s remarks about American POWs and MIAs from Vietnam sent the Bush Administration scrambling and had a no-doubt unintended impact on the sensitive issue of U.S. aid for the Russian economy.

Yeltsin’s revelations about the POWs drew praise from Administration officials. One senior official said the Soviet Union had consistently denied holding U.S. military men from Vietnam or any other war and that Yeltsin “just told us the Soviets had lied to us.”

A joint U.S.-Russia commission that has been studying the MIA situation since January was ordered to meet at once in Moscow to begin a thorough investigation of information in the Soviet archives. The commission is headed by Malcolm Toon, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov, a senior adviser to Yeltsin.

Bush praised Yeltsin and the Russian government for raising the issue.

But top officials were clearly bewildered by the development. When a reporter said that the public record on the issue is “confused,” a senior Administration official said: “So are we. That’s why Mac Toon is going to Moscow.”

POW SHOCK WAVES: Yeltsin’s remarks may cause new problems for Bush. A7

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Slashing the Stockpiles

The new U.S.-Russian arms treaty would go far beyond the limits set under the START treaty. At stake: The long-range nuclear missiles that for decades represented the threat of a world consumed by nuclear holocaust and prompted citizens to turn basements into bomb shelters.

U.S. Russia Current number of warheads: 10,000 10,000 Levels under START treaty reductions: 8,556 6,449 New limits proposed Tuesday: 3,000-3,500 3,000-3,500

The timetable: The new cuts would be completed by the year 2003 and possibly as early as 2000.

U.S. gives up . . . The submarine-launched ballistic missiles-the staple of U.S. nuclear forces-would be cut by more than half-from 3,840 to 1,750.

Russia gives up . . . All land-based heavy missiles with multiple warheads-the core of Russia’s nuclear arsenal-are to be scrapped.