Safety Is Fewer Missiles

President Bush pulled out all the stops for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The White House meeting, followed by 21/2 days at the Bush ranch in Texas, was supposed to cement the friendship between the two. Mostly, it did. Bush ignored the far right and treated Putin as a partner to be consulted.

The dividends came fast and big--no more negotiators haggling for years about the explosive power of nuclear warheads. Bush and Putin boldly agreed to reduce the stockpile of warheads by about two-thirds over a decade.

Their reasons for wanting to slash missile forces, however, are quite different. Moscow cannot afford to keep maintaining and testing them. The Bush administration, however, wants to move from offensive to defensive weaponry--a national missile defense. It believes that by cutting the missile force, the United States can demonstrate to Russia and China that its actions are purely defensive.

Putin wasn’t buying, at least not yet. Despite the hopes of the Bush administration, he would not alter the 1972 ABM Treaty, which forbids development of a nationwide antiballistic missile system. Arms control analysts say that Putin won’t raise a fuss if the administration skirts the edges of the treaty. The Russians figure that no one knows whether testing will actually lead to anything; they intend to make their real stand if a system can ever be deployed. Meanwhile, the United States would sink billions into what’s likely to be a rat hole.

This is fine from the Russian perspective, but not from America’s. The United States should not be wasting increasingly scarce resources on the 21st century’s version of the Maginot Line. Instead, it should spend a little more to help Russia keep track of and decommission its nuclear stockpile; last month Congress rejected spending an additional $131 million to help accomplish that.

Putin clearly wants to move from a lingering Cold War mentality to alliance with the West. One of the most important changes is a willingness to work with NATO on common policies against terrorism and weapons proliferation. This is an amazing contrast with the threatening noises Russia was making until recently about NATO and its expansion into the Baltic states.

Bush’s aim should be to lock in Russian cooperation as quickly as possible so that Putin’s successors cannot reverse any changes. Missile defense is a mirage. Effective cooperation with Russia is not.