Once Explosive, Arms Control Is No Longer a Hot Issue

During the Cold War, few East-West issues rated more superpower summit time or drew greater public interest than efforts to ease the nuclear standoff.

But when the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed and communism faded, they took with them much of the public fear of death in a nuclear attack. Interest in controlling the use of nuclear, chemical and other nonconventional weapons waned as well.

The issue of proliferation has never recovered as a priority, but arms control specialists insist that the dangers are potentially closer at hand, less predictable and arguably greater than before.

“People think that since the Soviet Union collapsed, that it must all be pretty OK, and that’s just not so,” said Jack Mendelsohn, deputy director of the Arms Control Assn., a Washington-based think tank. “They are not focused on these things anymore; there isn’t that same sense of concern.”

This mood is reflected in Clinton administration priorities, in which arms control often has become a second-tier item, pushed aside by regional crises and such goals as expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“On the worry list, arms control comes in somewhere between the strength of the Mexican peso and the fight against drugs,” said an administration official who declined to be identified.

A more domestic-oriented Senate, which must ratify arms control agreements, is also focused elsewhere.

In short profiles noting the background and interests of each of the 15 freshman senators published by the Congressional Quarterly after last month’s elections, arms control or disarmament is not mentioned once. At the same time, experts in the field, such as Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), are departing.

President Clinton’s point man on the issue, John Holum of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, said he believes that the low level of interest is partly because of a lack of public understanding of the risks.

“We need to do a better job explaining the issues, making them more tangible,” he said. “These [arms control] problems are bigger and more complex than ever before. They are closer to Americans than ever before . . . [but] thus far, the story hasn’t penetrated.”

That story is disturbing.

Although long-range nuclear missiles are no longer targeted on such cities as Toledo, Ohio, and Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, the five acknowledged nuclear powers--Britain, France, China, the United States and Russia--between them still possess more than 17,000 nuclear warheads, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

And while the turnover of Soviet-era nuclear weapons by former republics Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to Moscow is widely acknowledged as a major diplomatic success, arms control specialists warn that more than 1,200 tons of dangerous weapons-grade nuclear material still float around in the former Soviet Union, including those three countries.

Concern also is growing about the nuclear threshold states of Israel, Pakistan and India.

China is believed to have provided key assistance to Pakistan’s effort to develop nuclear weapons, while India earlier this month reported the successful completion of tests on a new medium-range missile--which New Delhi has the capability to arm with nuclear material.

But by far the biggest worry for arms control specialists--and one seen as presenting the likeliest direct danger to Americans--is the heightened potential for the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons technology from the relative safety of responsible nations into the hands of aggressive, volatile regimes or small terrorist groups.

With the Cold War’s predictable bipolar politics now more diffuse and uncertain without the discipline of the two superpowers, one primary U.S. countermeasure to the threat of nuclear proliferation, deterrence, is practically useless.

Michael Krepon, the president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank that focuses on arms control issues, said, “The amount of destruction that can be caused by a crude device with fissionable [weapons-grade nuclear] material can exceed all the American casualties in Vietnam.

“The likely user will not be a state,” he added. “It will be a group of disgruntled individuals or a group with some state backing. The [arms control] problems now are different and in some ways they are a lot harder, but they don’t get public attention.”

Amid this cocktail of public indifference and changing threats, the administration has set a broad agenda that includes winning Senate ratification next year of an accord banning chemical weapons and of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would end all nuclear weapons testing.

The administration also wants to strengthen a 1972 international convention banning biological weapons; to nudge Moscow to ratify the second Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty (START II) that would further cut U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals; and to begin work on treaties that would ban the production of weapons-grade nuclear materials and conventional land mines.

The next important step on this agenda is likely to come in spring when, Holum said, the administration plans a full-court press to get the Chemical Weapons Convention ratified by a skeptical Senate before April 29, the day it comes into force.

The convention, negotiated in Geneva and endorsed by the United Nations in 1992, has been signed by 65 nations, including the United States. But it has languished in the Senate, going through more than a dozen committee hearings before Clinton withdrew it before a floor vote in September after it became mired in election-year politics.

Holum said that Senate approval is now his priority. But administration officials admit it will be an uphill fight to win ratification.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is viewed as no friend of arms control treaties in general, believing they put the U.S. at a disadvantage because other countries ignore their commitments.

Last year, in his bid to reorganize the foreign affairs sector of government, Helms cut the funding for Holum’s agency by nearly a third. That forced the agency to freeze most hiring, purchasing, promotions, training and travel for several months.

Holum, along with some independent arms control specialists, said he believes that the impact of next spring’s Senate vote could extend far beyond the fate of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

If the treaty is not ratified, hope would dim sharply for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Clinton is expected to submit to the Senate later next year.

“This isn’t an argument about the Chemical Weapons Convention--it’s about the principle of arms control treaties and their place in a post-Cold War world,” Holum said.

Arms control experts place part of the blame for the present standoff on Clinton, claiming that his failure to push the chemical weapons treaty hard early left it an easy target for critics.

“I think they are doing the right thing [on arms control], but there’s no sense of urgency to it,” said Lawrence Korb, an arms control expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “They don’t seem to recognize that the longer you wait, the more opposition builds.”

While the administration did win Senate ratification for the START II treaty this year, it appears to have made little headway in its efforts to push the Russian Duma, or lower house of parliament, to follow suit, a move needed to bring the treaty into force. The agreement would cut the nuclear arsenals of each side to a maximum of 3,500 strategic warheads.

U.S. officials claim that Defense Secretary William J. Perry’s recent testimony before the Duma helped ease Russian worries about the treaty, but comments from some lawmakers indicate otherwise.

Sergei N. Yushenkov, a member of the Duma’s defense committee, said Perry failed to sway the deputies “because the majority of them came in with firm prejudices. The present Duma will never ratify this treaty.”

For Russians, who watch their once-proud army disintegrate as the U.S. moves to push NATO eastward and bend the limits of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, there seems little incentive to spend large sums of money to reduce the nuclear weapons that make up one of their few remaining credible defenses.

“Whether it’s public indifference and administration ignorance or the other way around, I’m not sure,” Mendelsohn said. “But there are a lot of things coming up in the next few months, and without a lot more attention, it all could die.”

Said Krepon: “The president and the Cabinet will have to work hard [on the arms control agenda]; they didn’t do that during the first term.”

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Moscow contributed to this report.