NEWS ANALYSIS : Nuclear Accord Puts Navy Out in Front : Military: The Air Force, dominant in the Cold War, falls behind. Trident missile subs get spotlight.

President Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin did more than recast the balance of nuclear terror at last week’s summit. In their historic arms reduction accord, they also reshaped the balance of power between rival American military services.

In the summit’s wake, Pentagon officials scrambled to gauge the impact of the massive nuclear cuts, both on weapons and on the prestige of the service organizations that build and operate them.

Their conclusion: On both counts, the Navy left the Air Force in its wake.

For most of the Cold War, the Navy was the Air Force’s junior partner in staffing the U.S. doomsday arsenal. But last week, the Navy came away from the historic agreement bearing the crown jewel of the nation’s nuclear force--a fleet of 18 Trident missile submarines, at $2 billion a copy, that will carry more than 1,700 of the American nuclear force’s most durable and destructive nuclear warheads.

Consider, by contrast, the new position of the Air Force, which virtually dictated nuclear policy and dominated the nuclear debate through most of the Cold War: Once the Bush-Yeltsin agreement is in place, the service will have scrapped the $15-billion MX missile force that was at the center of a political firestorm for almost a decade.

In place of the MX, the Air Force will operate a single-warhead version of the Minuteman-3--a missile it first fielded in 1970, and which its top officials have conceded would be vulnerable even to a limited strike by the former Soviet Union’s remaining nuclear weapons.

Air Force officials added last week that to meet the new warhead limits, they will probably strip 85% of the B-1 and B-2 bomber force of their nuclear weapons, even though both controversial programs were sold to skeptical lawmakers as the centerpiece of the nation’s post-Cold War nuclear arsenal.

By the year 2003, when the accord is to be fully implemented, the venerable B-52H bombers--at that point more than 40 years old and within 10 years of their maximum retirement age--will represent the bulk of the Air Force’s nuclear bomber force. To protect the B-52s’ aging bodies and to maintain the bombers as a “retaliatory force”--a role long filled by submarines--the bombers will be kept off alert.

In an age when non-nuclear conflicts are expected to dominate Pentagon planning, the Navy’s suddenly dominant position in nuclear weapons may be a dubious prize. But Pentagon insiders agree that from Capitol Hill to the White House, the Navy’s victory will burnish the service’s status and give it new clout in everything from drafting defense policy to scrambling for defense dollars.

Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice on Friday cautioned that “the Air Force is going to continue to be a strong part of the nuclear deterrence capability.” But he acknowledged that the bombers’ relegation to a role as “hedge” was a significant change from the central role in which they were originally cast.

Senior Bush Administration officials said that in negotiating the dramatic arms agreement with Russia, they were intent on maintaining all three legs of the “nuclear triad”--the combination of bombers, land-based missiles and submarine-launched missiles that was designed to ensure that ample firepower would survive to retaliate against a nuclear strike.

They got their triad, said retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, deputy director of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. “But it looks more like an isosceles triangle,” he added, with two short legs belonging to the Air Force and a long one--the Trident subs--the Navy’s.

“The Air Force and the Navy now are clearly equal partners in the triad, and the Navy has the better of the relationship because of the submarines’ invulnerability” to attack, Carroll said. “The Navy wins the survivability argument hands down, and they’re going to flog that all the way to avoid giving up anything else.”

The Navy’s new stake in the nuclear arsenal also has edged the Air Force out of a longtime monopoly over the command of U.S. nuclear forces in wartime. On June 1, the Air Force deactivated its Strategic Air Command in Omaha and agreed to place its nuclear forces under a new wartime unit, the Strategic Command. For the first time in the nuclear era, that reorganization would put a Navy admiral in charge of Air Force nuclear weapons.

In its new position, the Navy may now inherit many of the Air Force’s political headaches, and critics are already training their guns on the service.

Already, critics like Carroll have argued that the Navy will waste billions of taxpayer dollars in carrying out the nuclear reductions agreed to by Bush and Yeltsin.

Under the Bush Administration’s plan, the Navy would carry its share of nuclear warheads--more than 1,700 weapons--on a total of 18 Trident submarines. Carroll and a growing chorus of congressional critics contend that by consolidating the weapons more efficiently, the Navy could operate fewer submarines and buy fewer of the Trident missiles than the 432 it now plans to buy at more than $150 million apiece.

Such efficiencies, said Carroll, could save between $3 billion and $18 billion in procurement costs alone. But the Navy, he charged, is more interested in preserving the budgets and manpower associated with operating 18 Tridents than it is in saving taxpayers’ money.

The Air Force will not miss that kind of controversy, officials said. And to some, the Air Force did not lose its dominant position in the nuclear realm at all. Rather, it has seen the shape of things to come and backed willingly out of a business on the wane.

With the Cold War over and the victories of conventional air power in the Persian Gulf War, the Air Force is perfectly happy to shed its nuclear mantle and take up a new non-nuclear battle cry, said William M. Arkin, director of military research for Greenpeace International.

“In a sense, the Air Force has been more savvy about understanding the future,” Arkin said. “And the future is not in nuclear weapons.”