Arms Pact Called 'Gift' to the World : Diplomacy: His presidency nearly over, Bush arrives in Moscow to sign sweeping nuclear disarmament treaty. U.S. made important concessions to clinch the accord.

By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG

Jan. 3, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MOSCOW —

President Bush, intent on leaving the White House in a flourish of statesmanship, came to frigid Moscow on Saturday to sign a nuclear disarmament treaty so unprecedented in scope that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin called it “our joint gift to the peoples of the Earth.”

“The two powers who once divided the world have now come together to make it a better and a safer place,” Bush, who leaves office in 17 days, said after arriving from Somalia, eight hours away and 72 degrees warmer.

Today, in a ceremony marking the centerpiece of Bush’s final summit meeting with Yeltsin, he and the Russian leader will sign the second Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty--START II--locking in cuts so deep that neither of the former Cold War foes will have an arsenal big enough to contemplate a surprise nuclear attack on the other.

The pact, the most sweeping to come out of three decades of arms control talks between Moscow and Washington, slashes their strategic forces back to levels not seen in the United States since the early 1960s and in Russia since the mid-1970s.

START II’s bold arithmetic is also a tacit admission--and a humiliating one for some Russians--that the days of the Kremlin’s striving for nuclear parity with the Americans are gone.

As he raised a glass in the Kremlin’s vaulted Hall of Facets to toast Bush and his wife, Barbara, Yeltsin said that democratic Russia, which emerged from the collapse of Soviet communism a year ago, has broken with the logic of the arms race.

“I think it important for Russia’s might as a great power to be determined not by the quantity of missiles but by the living standards of its citizens, the development of culture, education and national traditions,” he said.

START II’s key clause is the complete elimination of all land-based strategic missiles equipped with multiple warheads, the most destructive and destabilizing weapon in the world.

Bush, who spent the New Year’s holiday with U.S. troops involved in famine relief in Somalia, left behind his desert fatigues and a dawn temperature of 66 degrees in the East African country to brave Moscow’s coldest spell of the winter so far.

At 2:41 p.m., when Bush emerged smiling and hatless from Air Force One here, it was a sunny, crisp minus 6 degrees.

In a friendly welcome but one without pomp, bands or arrival speeches, Yeltsin greeted Bush with a big bear hug after the U.S. leader, a bulky muffler billowing from his dark overcoat, walked down the stairway of Air Force One. Yeltsin removed his own hat in deference.

Also hatless and wearing a lavender coat, Mrs. Bush, who did not accompany her husband to Somalia, landed 35 minutes before her husband at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport aboard another U.S. government jet. She was accompanied by White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III and Baker’s wife, Susan.

Sheremetyevo’s taxiway was so icy that a jet engine mounted on a fuel truck was used to blast the rime away. The surrounding birch trees were enveloped in ghostly hoar frost, like a tableau from the movie “Doctor Zhivago.” “I think it’s beautiful,” Susan Baker said.

The presidents motored into Moscow in separate limousines. Police pushed back a score of right-wing extremists who had gathered at the airport’s entrance carrying signs in Russian that said “Down with Bush!” and “Russia is not Somalia.”

Bush may never have seen them from his Cadillac. Otherwise, the icy streets of Moscow, whose populace was celebrating the year’s biggest holiday, were virtually deserted. The sole crowd passed by the motorcade was a line of motorists queued up on Leningradsky Prospekt for scarce gasoline.

The only official event Saturday was a dinner offered by Yeltsin in Bush’s honor in the same sumptuous hall of the Kremlin where Ivan the Terrible feasted after defeating the Tatars and Peter the Great toasted victory over the Swedes.

In a vodka toast to Yeltsin, Bush paid tribute to the “patriot who silenced the guns of August” by facing down the 1991 hard-line Communist coup. He assured him that President-elect Bill Clinton would be a “100% partner” for Russia.

Yeltsin, who pushed to close a deal on START II before Bush left office rather than risk negotiating from scratch with his successor, said he was confident that with Clinton’s inauguration “there will be no lull in the Russian-American dialogue.”

Before Bush’s arrival, sources said, Yeltsin sent a confidential missive to Clinton proposing a get-acquainted summit after the Democrat’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

Under the timetable hammered out under START II and assuming the treaty is ratified by the top legislative chamber of each country, the United States will have 3,500 warheads by the time the arsenals are slashed and Russia will have 3,000.

By Jan. 1, 2003, three-quarters of the strategic warheads the two countries possessed at the start of the 1990s will have been scrapped.

“For the first time, these MIRVs (multiple-warhead ICBMs), in the life of the treaty, will come to an end,” a senior Administration official said. “And, in coming to an end, it will remove once and for all . . . the capability of that dreaded thing called ‘the first strike.’ ”

In a final round of horse trading between Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger and Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev last Monday and Tuesday in Geneva, the United States made important concessions to clinch the pact, in large part because Russia’s ravaged economy is now incapable of massive defense restructuring.

Yeltsin’s government now gets to keep 105 of its 170 SS-19 MIRVs but will have to remove five of their six thermonuclear warheads. In the original agreement initialed by Bush and Yeltsin during their last summit last June, the ICBMs and their payloads were to have been destroyed.

The resource-strapped Russians also won the right to retain 90 subterranean silos now used for SS-18 missiles, each a 10-warhead behemoth that was the heaviest ICBM in the Soviet strategic panoply. The SS-18s, like other multiple-warhead missiles, must be destroyed, but the 90 shafts will be converted for now-mobile SS-25s, which have a sole warhead.

The Russians also won the right to inspect 100 U.S. strategic bombers that will be converted to carry non-nuclear payloads.

In what U.S. officials said was a stark departure from the Pentagon’s previous obsession with secrecy, the Russians will be allowed for the first time to inspect the B-2 bomber to verify that it carries no more than 16 nuclear charges.

A new bargain was also struck on how to estimate a bomber’s payload, which Russian officials were trumpeting as proof that START II serves their national interest.

Now actual payloads will be verified by inspections. The Russians claim that the theoretical load figure used by the Americans was sometimes only half of the number of cruise missiles that a B-52 actually carried.

The United States must also halve its seaborne strategic arsenal: from 3,456 warheads to a maximum of 1,750, Russian Foreign Ministry sources said. For Moscow, that was a key rollback, because Russian forces in this field are far punier.

Kozyrev, speaking at the gangway of Barbara Bush’s airplane, said the two countries’ negotiators initialed the definitive text of START II only Friday night. The document then was flown here from Geneva for the presidents’ signatures.

If for Bush the Moscow trip--his 25th abroad as U.S. President--is a diplomatic swan song, for Yeltsin, the 24 hours or so should provide a welcome respite from domestic concerns. He now faces a groundswell of conservative criticism that forced him last month to sacrifice his economics czar, reformer Yegor T. Gaidar.

On Saturday, Russia marked without joy the first anniversary of the end of state-imposed price controls, a measure that has eaten like an acid into most families’ buying power.

Any political dividends for Yeltsin will be of short duration, because already under his predecessor, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Russians grew totally weary of the use of foreign policy razzle-dazzle to make them forget domestic problems.

Moreover, nationalists and Communists in Russia’s legislature, the Supreme Soviet, have denounced START II as a sellout of Russian interests and vow to try to block its ratification.

Further complicating the picture, the fate of the pact doesn’t depend on Washington and Moscow alone. It is also contingent on an earlier superpower agreement, START I, which was signed by Bush and Gorbachev in Moscow in July, 1991, and which calls for strategic arms reductions to 7,000-9,000 warheads.

By its own terms, START II will not go into effect unless START I is ratified by all powers concerned, including Ukraine. Kiev vowed formal approval by last year but then began shilly-shallying for financial and security reasons.

The United States has offered the Ukrainians $175 million to help pay for getting rid of the missiles and silos listed in START I. Last week, Ukrainian officials said they need almost 10 times that sum and indicated that ratification by their Parliament could not take place before February.

In the first hours of Bush’s stay in Russia, U.S. officials were keen to dispel a widespread impression that the brief summit meeting is nothing more than a glorified signing ceremony.

In particular, they assert, Bush will press for Yeltsin’s support of a proposed Security Council resolution allowing the use of force to implement the United Nations’ “no-fly” zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Balkans. The leaders are to hold talks this morning before they sign the treaty.

The Bushes were spending the night at Spaso House, the official residence of the U.S. ambassador in Moscow. In a sense, the President came full circle--next door is the embassy of Somalia.

The Treaty’s Key Points

Presidents Bush and Yeltsin are scheduled to sign the second Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty today. The treaty is supposed to:

Reduce both nations’ nuclear weapons from the current level of about 10,000 each to between 3,000 and 3,500 by the year 2003.

Ban land-based intercontinental missiles with more than one warhead.

THE TWO MAIN VICTIMS

The treaty will eliminate two key missiles in the U.S. and Russian arsenals:

SS-18: Known as the Satan, the huge missile is the former Soviet Union’s most dangerous weapon.

Warheads: 10

Length: 181 feet

Width: 10 feet

MX Peacekeeper: Developed by the United States to replace the Minuteman III, it allowed greater range and accuracy.

Warheads: 10