Bush Aims to End Haggling With Russia Over Weapons

The new era of “trust and cooperation” between Russia and the United States that President Bush declared Tuesday marks the end of the painstaking process of negotiating the arms control pacts that helped provide global stability during the Cold War.

The way Bush sees it, it is a waste of time to haggle over marginal reductions in nuclear arsenals, the way Washington and Moscow have done for decades.

Instead, he says it is time to declare that the two nations are no longer adversaries and need not maintain roughly equal nuclear stockpiles.

To that end, Bush announced his intention to reduce the U.S. strategic arsenal by roughly two-thirds in the next 10 years, regardless of what Russia might choose to do about its own stock of nuclear weapons.

Bush, making his announcement at a joint White House news conference with President Vladimir V. Putin, clearly expected the Russian leader to reciprocate. And later in the day, Putin did. He pledged in a speech at the Russian Embassy here that his nation also will reduce its stock of nuclear warheads, now numbering 5,858, by about two-thirds.

“A new relationship based upon trust and cooperation is one that doesn’t need endless hours of arms control discussions,” Bush said. “I can remember watching the news years ago and seeing that people would sit at tables for hours and hours and hours, trying to reach reduced levels of nuclear armament.”

The arms control process that Bush dismissed forms a significant part of the White House legacy of his own father, former President George Bush, who signed two major treaties.

Under the first of those treaties, signed in 1991 with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the U.S. and Russia are supposed to reduce their number of warheads to about 6,000 each by the end of this year. That will require the Americans to eliminate more than 1,000 warheads in the next six weeks. Russia is already below the ceiling.

Under the START II treaty, signed in 1993 with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, the two nations are expected to reduce their totals to between 3,000 and 3,500 warheads each by the end of this decade.

But on Tuesday, Bush announced plans to unilaterally cut the U.S. arsenal to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads within the next 10 years, skipping over the START II limits and even eclipsing an agreement in principle reached by former President Clinton and Yeltsin to cut arsenals to between 2,000 and 2,500 by 2007. Detailed negotiations on that proposal have not even started.

Bush’s supporters, including some Cold War conservatives who once expressed deep distrust of the Kremlin, said that reducing the U.S. arsenal to the level announced by the president will not change the strategic balance even if Moscow does not reduce its number of warheads below the level set by the START II pact.

“A piece of paper with Russia, as much as the Russians would want it, does not address the current multipolar balance of power in the world,” said Ariel Cohen, a Russia expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. “It is no longer us and them anymore. We have to worry about bigger and badder threats,” a reference to the possibility of terrorists obtaining nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

But some Cold War liberals expressed concern about unverified cuts in weaponry.

“It is a little shortsighted,” said Wade Boese, an analyst at the liberal Arms Control Assn. “A codified agreement is advantageous to the United States as well as the Russians. Transparency and predictability translate into stability.

“It is presuming too much to think that we will always have friendly relations with Russia,” Boese added. “We need something that is codified. Unilateral reductions can turn into unilateral buildups in the future.”

The U.S. would still have the power to incinerate the planet with 1,700 warheads. But the number makes the U.S. military nervous. Although there is no official Pentagon position, military planners believe that 2,500 missiles is about as low as it would be safe to go.

Adm. Richard W. Mies, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, told a Senate subcommittee in July that the U.S. must have enough nuclear weapons to ride out a first-strike attack and still be able to retaliate.

“Deterrence ultimately depends not on our capability to strike first, but on the assurance that we always have the capability to strike second,” he said.