Clinton, Yeltsin OK New Look at Arms Treaties

Amid a sudden rejuvenation of their nations’ struggling relationship, President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin ordered their deputies Sunday to discuss rewriting segments of a 27-year-old treaty restricting the deployment of missile defenses. They also agreed on initial talks to reduce long-range nuclear weapons.

“The two countries are back in business,” Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, said as the two presidents pledged to move beyond the scars of their differences over Kosovo and to return to arms control issues that have dogged their nations for decades.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, written in 1972, in the midst of the Cold War, limits missile defenses. Until Sunday, Russia had objected to U.S. requests to consider amending it to allow deployment of a still-unproven national missile defense without violating the pact.

The Clinton-Yeltsin meeting came on the final day here of the annual summit of the Group of 8, the world’s seven leading industrial democracies plus Russia. And the challenges of dealing with the aftermath of the Kosovo war--among them, rebuilding relations with Moscow--dominated the gathering.

Completing meetings that began Friday, the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States:

* Endorsed a mini-Marshall Plan for rebuilding war-torn areas of the Balkans and developing southeastern Europe as a whole. The plan, originally proposed by the Germans, envisages economic development as the best way to reduce divisive ethnic tensions and integrate the volatile region into the European mainstream.

* Committed themselves to improving the global trading system, including strengthening the 5-year-old World Trade Organization and formally backing a new round of global trade talks to begin in December in Seattle.

* Agreed to support the world’s poorest countries with an eight-point plan that includes debt relief, removing constraints on foreign aid so these countries can make better use of assistance money, and promoting democracy and human rights.

* Pledged to promote a cleaner environment by pressing for tighter antipollution standards and making environmental considerations a dimension of the next round of global trade negotiations.

The roller-coaster diplomacy between Moscow and Washington had already begun a downhill path at the start of the latest Balkan war in late March. It reached a nadir with the Russians’ dash to control the airport in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, after fighting ended in the southern province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.

But relations appeared to turn smartly upward Sunday after the two presidents spent an hour in what Berger described as “one of the best” of their 17 meetings over the past 6 1/2 years.

As a gesture of goodwill, Yeltsin brought what was presented to Clinton as the complete Soviet military and civilian archives on John F. Kennedy, including those on the assassination of the 35th president. Lee Harvey Oswald, widely believed to be the assassin, lived in the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman before returning to the United States.

Berger said U.S. officials had not had an opportunity to study the documents, written in Russian.

“All interesting elements will be made public,” he added.

Unlike other meetings Clinton has held with Yeltsin, however, Sunday’s did not extend beyond the allotted hour, a relatively short period for such conferences.

As they talked in a small, windowless conference room of the Renaissance Hotel, Clinton told Yeltsin that the West’s willingness to help Russia’s economy is strong, Berger said. But, Clinton added, Russia must first agree with the International Monetary Fund on economic reforms.

Such an achievement, the national security advisor said, could trigger a rescheduling of Russia’s debt to the multinational lending agencies and wealthiest nations. The debt dates to the Soviet era, which ended in 1991.

“I am personally committed to it,” Yeltsin was said to have declared of the effort to gain an agreement with the IMF.

The degree to which Clinton worked to turn the talks toward the future was demonstrated by his decision not to raise the issue of Russia’s deployment of about 200 troops at the Pristina airport before the assigned British soldiers could secure the facility.

“It simply would have diverted this meeting into a rehash of recriminations on both sides,” Berger said.

“There’s very little looking back in this meeting,” said the national security advisor, who attended along with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her deputy, Strobe Talbott.

Yeltsin made much the same point when he arrived at the Cologne-Bonn airport for his seven-hour visit and was asked by reporters as he approached what he would tell Clinton.

“The most important thing after a fight is to make peace. That’s the main thing,” he replied, using a Russian word that describes a scrappy street quarrel.

His foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, told reporters in a two-minute encounter after the mini-summit: “The main thing the two presidents wanted to emphasize is that they have the political will to improve relations between their countries. The president is very satisfied with the meeting. I think both presidents are.”

Both groups of arms talks set in motion Sunday will begin later this summer, the two sides said in a joint statement.

The ultimate progress of preliminary negotiations to further cut the U.S. and Russian arsenals of long-range weapons will depend on the fate of the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which would severely diminish the number of both countries’ nuclear arms. It was signed in 1993 by Yeltsin and President Bush. Neither the Senate nor the Russian parliament has ratified it.

Berger said the formal negotiation of a so-called START III could begin swiftly after ratification of the 1993 agreement if the preliminary talks succeed. The weapons covered are those that carry massive nuclear warheads atop missiles capable of reaching each nation’s territory in less than half an hour.

Their protective aspects notwithstanding, the sort of defense systems prohibited by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty are considered destabilizing because they could give a nuclear power the confidence that it could launch a preemptive nuclear attack without risking retribution.

The purpose of the 1972 agreement negotiated with the Soviet Union was to prevent either nuclear superpower from developing such a defense. The treaty limits each signatory to 100 defensive missiles, intended to destroy incoming warheads and deployed at one site.

Last spring, Congress symbolically declared a missile defense system a national priority. Clinton, who three years ago said the concept of using a missile to blast another from the sky was “unproved” and “ineffective,” sought $6.6 billion in January to possibly deploy a system by 2005.

The program under development is a scaled-back outgrowth of the “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative launched by President Reagan in 1983.

The program is the Pentagon’s largest research effort, built around rockets, radar, heat-detecting sensors and such futuristic technologies as laser weapons and intended to eventually protect U.S. troops abroad and civilians at home.

Under current plans, the United States would plant 20 interceptor missiles, possibly in North Dakota or Alaska. A deployment decision is not expected until next June.

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall and Maura Reynolds contributed to this report.

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STEADY PERFORMANCE

Although a bit shaky physically, Boris Yeltsin was a force at the G-8 summit. A14