Yeltsin Calls for 5-Nation Pact to Reduce Nuclear Arsenals

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin called Monday for a treaty among all five major nuclear nations that would cut remaining arsenals, stop the production of warhead materials and ban the reuse of nuclear charges from dismantled missiles.

Speaking to the General Assembly, Yeltsin launched the innovative idea of a treaty that would encompass Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States in one, overarching security system. “There is an urgent need for all nuclear states to participate in the process of reducing and limiting nuclear weapons,” he said.

He offered no further details on the proposed treaty and left similarly vague a suggestion that the United States and Russia continue to reduce their arms stockpiles.

But his nebulous vision nonetheless amounted to the first major Russian arms initiative since the 1993 signing of the START II treaty, which called for slashing Russian and U.S. arsenals by two-thirds to about 3,000 warheads each.

By proposing to trim the volume of stockpiled nuclear materials, Yeltsin’s plan aimed to calm Western fears--grown acute in the wake of recent German arrests of would-be plutonium smugglers--that Russian nuclear materials could fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue governments.

The “loose nukes” issue is expected to figure prominently in summit discussions today and Wednesday between Yeltsin and President Clinton in Washington. The two are expected to sign a treaty on improving control over nuclear stockpiles.

Yeltsin’s treaty proposal evoked cautious interest from American officials. Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Yeltsin’s ideas would be carefully examined. “They seem creative and intriguing, but obviously this is something that is going to take a lot of time to analyze so that we can figure out how best to move into the next phase,” she told reporters.

Yeltsin’s proposals came as something of a surprise to Clinton Administration officials who had predicted that the United States and Russia would be content for some time to avoid hard-to-implement treaties and would stick, instead, to unilateral cuts.

It also appeared to contradict a recent assertion by Sergei Karaganov, a Yeltsin adviser on foreign policy, that “most arms controllers in Russia believe their American partners have pushed them a bit too far.”

But other advisers said Yeltsin came to the United Nations determined to make his mark by presenting a distinctly Russian view of the world and somehow rivaling Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s 1988 U.N. speech--an end-of-the-Cold-War milestone in which he promised to cut half a million troops and declared his allegiance to “universal human values” rather than Marxist doctrines.

Like the United States, Russia has struggled to define its foreign policy in the post-Cold War world. Various arms of the Russian government often contradict each other as they try to manage the sticky conflicts in former Soviet republics.

Yeltsin’s address, billed as a program for Russia’s foreign activities, reflected a shift in Moscow’s priorities from superpower relations to Russia as a regional power.

Six years after Gorbachev’s speech, U.S.-Russian rapprochement is taken as almost a matter of course. Although Yeltsin offered the arms cuts proposals as his concrete plan for creating a safer world, he appeared to care much more about asserting Russia’s own “sphere of influence” in the former Soviet Union.

He described Russia’s ties with the other former Soviet republics as “a blood relationship” and argued, “The main peacekeeping burden in the territory of the former Soviet Union lies today upon the Russian Federation.”