Bush, Yeltsin Set to Sign Arms Pact : Nuclear cutbacks: Leaders will meet this weekend to seal START II. Yeltsin calls it ‘treaty of the century,’ but some key Russians think they’re giving up too much.

President Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin formally announced Wednesday that they will meet this weekend in a Black Sea resort to sign the most sweeping nuclear arms control agreement ever attempted.

But in Russia, the treaty--which calls for a two-thirds reduction in the Russian and American nuclear arsenals--provoked an intense reaction from skeptics, who said they feared that Yeltsin may have given up too much, too fast.

While the President embarked on his 25th overseas trip, to visit American troops and the people of famine- and war-racked Somalia en route to the summit in Russia, Yeltsin offered an enthusiastic assessment of the START II arms control pact, which he called the “treaty of the century.”

“You can go 100 years without seeing an event like this,” he said of the accord, whose framework he and Bush had agreed to last June. “The world will breathe calmly because there will not be a global catastrophe.”

But other Russian commentators were far less sanguine.

“We have to disarm,” the conservative Pravda newspaper allowed. “But using our heads, not in a hurry.”

Iona Andronov, deputy chairman of the Russian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, warned that, if the final version of the START II treaty contains certain expected provisions, it will not be “the treaty of the century” but “the treachery of the century.”

The liberal Nezavisimaya Gazeta, or Independent Newspaper, published a detailed opinion piece arguing that Russia, by agreeing to the forces that will result from the treaty, will give away all its military advantages and perhaps even leave itself vulnerable to a nuclear first strike.

And Andrei Kortunov, an arms control expert at the U.S.A.-Canada Institute, confirmed that “the basic public perception of the treaty is that it’s not fair.”

That public opinion could translate into outright rejection by the Supreme Soviet, the Russian legislature that will be called upon to ratify the START II agreement.

While American analysts have said the prospects for ratification of the treaty appear generally optimistic in the U.S. Congress, Sergei Baburin, a hard-line Supreme Soviet deputy and one of Yeltsin’s most vehement opponents, predicted that the Russian president’s push for START II might even help bring about his political demise.

“In some respects,” Baburin said, “signing the treaty will push Yeltsin to his end. If he signs it, it will mean that the sense of rationality has deserted him.”

For both Yeltsin and Bush, a day of triumph--the day when they were announcing a treaty with potentially sweeping global effect--was tempered by domestic political realities.

For Bush, who had made foreign policy the centerpiece of his White House years, the START II agreement was reached long after his election defeat. As a lame duck, he did not celebrate the treaty or the planned summit with the same zest he has shown in the past.

The terse statement he delivered Wednesday paled in comparison with the lofty language he had used when announcing previous treaties and summits.

At his news conference, where he said he had accepted the treaty and gave his summit plans, the President bristled with a biting defense of his Iran-Contra pardons. Bush, who did not smile throughout his brief announcement in the winter landscape of the Rose Garden, described the START II agreement as “a great step for mankind.”

As for Yeltsin, he has been mired for months now in a wrenching battle with the increasingly powerful right-wing elements of Russia. The influence of conservatives and former Communists has seemed to grow day by day, as the efforts of Yeltsin and his economic reformers cause greater and greater hardship for ordinary Russians.

Yeltsin appeared hale, if a bit more puffy-faced than usual, on Wednesday during a televised year-end speech in which he promised Russians some relief from “the crisis we’re all heartily sick of.”

His description of this past year as the most difficult for Russians since World War II bore out the widespread opinion that Yeltsin had hurried along the treaty’s signing in part because he was badly in need of a foreign policy victory to offset his domestic plight.

After recent clashes with his conservative Parliament, Yeltsin wanted “to assert himself as the leader of the country and as the person in charge of foreign and defense policy,” the U.S.A.-Canada Institute’s Kortunov said.

The Russian president also probably did not want to take the risk that the post-Jan. 20 Clinton White House would take months to re-examine the treaty, jeopardizing it in Russia’s volatile political climate, Kortunov added.

White House officials have been keenly aware of the tumult in Russia.

Bush has spoken repeatedly by telephone with Yeltsin in recent weeks, as the two leaders have attempted to prod along the negotiations, which culminated in the START II accord in Geneva on Tuesday.

After a final chat with Yeltsin on Wednesday morning, Bush announced to reporters in the Rose Garden that--as anticipated--the treaty was acceptable to him and that he and Yeltsin will meet Saturday and Sunday in the Russian resort town of Sochi, where Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once vacationed after setting in motion brutal purges of his Communist Party allies.

Bush and Yeltsin will follow a relatively spare schedule. After a brisk tour through Somalia, Bush will arrive in Sochi to dine with Yeltsin and hold a meeting with him.

Then the two leaders will sign the START II accord, under which the 10,000-plus warheads that each country has in its arsenal will be reduced to between 3,000 and 3,500 each by the year 2003--or three years earlier, if the United States provides Russia with financial help to meet targets.

Bush said he will use the Sochi meeting “to discuss ways to fulfill the promise and the potential of the U.S.-Russia relations.”

But a White House official said that Bush’s purpose in seeing Yeltsin was chiefly to offer a sympathetic ear. Such matters as Iraq and the Yugoslav war may also be discussed. But the President’s lame-duck status means that the time devoted to private meetings with Yeltsin has been roughly halved, as compared with previous summits, the official said.

In Russia, commentators expressed deep concern about Yeltsin’s apparent haste with the arms accord, which would ban land-based intercontinental missiles with more than one warhead, eliminating the American MX missile and the Russians’ SS-18, Moscow’s most dangerous weapon.

The Russian Parliament’s Andronov complained that doing away with land-based missiles with multiple warheads but leaving alone submarine-based missiles would give the Americans an unfair advantage.

“It is common knowledge that most of such American missiles are based on submarines that keep swimming in our waters and occasionally bumping into our subs and ships,” he said. He accused Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev of “openly playing into America’s hands.”

Vladimir Belous of the Strategic Studies Center, writing in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, had similar concerns, pointing out that while the majority of American nuclear warheads are based on submarines, most Soviet warheads are land-based.

Under the START II treaty, he said, Russia must drastically reduce the very missiles that give it whatever advantage it has over American strategic forces. This, he contended, is an “unjustified concession to the United States.”

“The most serious flaw” of the agreement, he wrote, “is the necessity of restructuring Russian strategic forces along the American model.”

But in the United States, Spurgeon M. Keeney Jr., president and executive director of the Arms Control Assn. and former deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, praised the treaty.

He said it “codifies the end of the Cold War and underscores a fundamental change in thinking about the role of nuclear weapons in warfare.”

He said the treaty would achieve a vital goal, removing land-based, multiple-warhead missiles. Both sides during the Cold War had had grave worries about their foes’ ability to direct the warheads of one missile to 10 independent targets; multiple warhead missiles had become an inviting first-strike target at the outset of a nuclear exchange.

Their elimination, Keeney said at a briefing, “has been a long-standing objective of U.S. arms control policy. It’s extremely important because it substantially contributes to the stability of the strategic relationship.”

But in Russia, Belous and others also predicted serious problems, not only with ratification of the treaty but also with carrying it out if it is approved. Russia has already asked for financial help to pay for destroying weapons under the last treaty it signed.

“It will be tough to implement,” Kortunov said. “So maybe we just shouldn’t hurry up with a new treaty.”

Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Goldberg reported from Moscow.