U.S., Russia Cite Progress on Arms Cuts

U.S. and Russian officials claimed progress Friday toward a nuclear arms deal, yet after a day of talks they failed again to complete the agreement the two nations’ leaders hope to sign at a Moscow summit in three weeks.

After a session with Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said some sticking points remain, and he acknowledged that the deal might not be complete in time for the hoped-for summit signing.

Powell said that if the agreement is completed in time, “fine.... If we are unable to, the work will continue.

“Remaining differences are there,” he added, “and we are going to have to spend time and continue discussing them.”

Earlier in the day, Ivanov met with President Bush at the White House. The foreign minister was slightly more upbeat than Powell, saying the Russian side believes that there is a “very high probability” that the signing will occur May 23 as planned.

Late Friday, Bush told reporters at Camp David in Maryland: “We’ve been spending a lot of time with Russia to reach an agreement.... The secretary of State is optimistic. There’s some work that remains to be done. I’m looking forward to ... working closely with President [Vladimir V.] Putin.”

The negotiations are being closely watched as a test of the new U.S.-Russian relationship, and many analysts in both countries are confident that some kind of deal--perhaps a partial one--will be signed this month.

The key questions are how much ground the stronger United States will cede to get a deal, and to what extent the agreement will restrain the two sides in the management of their offensive nuclear arsenals.

Bush declared last year that he intends to reduce the offensive U.S. arsenal from more than 6,000 operationally deployed warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 in 10 years, and he called this a major step away from the Cold War rivalry. The Russians have said they intend to reduce their inventory to about 1,500 deployed warheads.

But the two have clashed over the U.S. insistence that it be allowed to keep some of the decommissioned warheads in storage, rather than destroying them, to have them available in case of an unexpected new threat.

Critics in Russia and elsewhere say that shifting missile and submarine warheads to warehouses--rather than destroying them--would make the downsizing far less significant than claimed.

The Russians cannot afford the upkeep of their nuclear arsenal and are going to face an appreciable decline in their capability no matter what deal is reached.

Many analysts believe that the Bush administration will not give way on the idea of this reserve inventory but will try to accommodate the Russians to a degree by providing some information on its size and composition. In the jargon of arms control, the deal will offer some “transparency” and “verifiability,” they predict.

The Russians also want the agreement to tie the size of each country’s offensive arsenal to its defensive capabilities. The Russians would like to have the political grounds to argue later that if the U.S. develops a missile defense shield, as the Bush administration hopes to do, it would have to further limit its offensive arsenal.

That issue apparently remains in play, experts say.

Still unclear is whether the agreement will take the form of a treaty or an executive order, Powell said. A treaty would require approval of two-thirds of the Senate, which could be hard to come by because of expected criticism from liberals and conservatives alike. An executive agreement, in contrast, could be approved with support from only half the members of the House and Senate.

Bush originally pressed to have only a verbal understanding. His concession on this point earlier this year has been taken as a sign of his desire to reach an agreement.

“It would be useful at this point for President Bush to be able to point to a tangible accomplishment in the new relationship that he’s building with President Putin,” said Karl F. Inderfurth, a former State Department official now with the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. “For the same reasons, it would be useful for President Putin to point to an accomplishment with ... Bush.”