Russia to Pack Away Arms but Not Discontent

When President Bush arrives in Moscow this week, the agreement the United States and Russia reached to reduce their nuclear arsenals by two-thirds will be the visit’s centerpiece.

But even as the accord is celebrated, Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin will grapple with a host of issues that loom as the latest tests of their evolving relationship. These range from the unresolved question of Moscow’s future role in the war on terrorism to the security of dismantled Russian nuclear weapons and the sale of Russian nuclear technology.

Bush leaves Washington on Wednesday on a seven-day trip that, along with the Moscow stop, will take him to St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris (with a side trip to Normandy) and Rome. It will be his eighth trip out of the country as president.

From a private dinner with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to a NATO summit in Rome, Bush will come face to face with a Europe whose official ties to the U.S. government are stronger than they have been in years, and yet, some experts say, whose citizens’ disaffection with American policies couldn’t be deeper.

German officials are increasingly concerned that anti-American demonstrations in Berlin could turn violent, and in Russia--where Bush’s visit has so far drawn little public attention--a survey by the Public Opinion Foundation found that 45% of those polled said they didn’t care much for the U.S. president, up from 25% just after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

‘An Increasingly Negative Drift’ in Europe

Across Europe, said Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Wolfgang Ischinger, there is “a strange parallelism”: From Washington to Moscow, rarely has there been such cooperation on policy matters.

“That’s the good news,” he said in an interview with a small group of reporters. “At the same time, there is an increasingly negative drift in the way the publics and newspapers describe the relationship.”

This drift, he said, reflects both a European concern that the U.S. government, at heart, favors a go-it-alone approach, and angry complaints that the United States’ Middle East policy ignores the rights and needs of Palestinians.

As the U.S.-Russian relationship continues to evolve more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the arms-control treaty symbolizes the efforts each country is making to find grounds for cooperation. But arms-control experts say it does little to reduce the threat that nuclear weapons continue to pose and fails to address the more immediate challenges to global stability.

The treaty, which requires confirmation by the U.S. Senate and the Russian Duma, is to last 10 years.

Without an extension, arms-control experts point out, the reductions that the agreement specifies--bringing the number of deployed warheads on each side from the current level of approximately 6,000 to a range of 1,700 to 2,200--could be abandoned by 2012. Then, a new buildup could begin.

And that is the likely high point of the meeting.

“This is going to be yet another feel-good summit--an expression of U.S.-Russian friendship and cooperation, but with little firm commitments or new programs,” said Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank.

Among the Russians’ top concerns, he said, are their entry into the World Trade Organization, cooperation with the United States in exporting Caspian Sea oil, and Russia’s integration into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. From the U.S. perspective, the top issue is control of Russian nuclear technology--making sure it does not fall into the hands of terrorists or contribute to developing nuclear weapons in Iran, Iraq or North Korea.

“I don’t believe the summit will substantially advance any of these agendas,” Cirincione said.

Arms Reduction Is What Clinton, Yeltsin Wanted

The weapons reduction is essentially what President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin agreed to in 1997. But their agreement faced too much opposition from Republicans in the Senate and Communists in the Duma to be enacted. Unlike the 1997 pact, this one does not include short-range nuclear weapons. Nor does it demand the dismantling of the warheads that are removed from weapons--a key concern, given the high degree of uncertainty about Russia’s ability to keep them secure.

When he announced the agreement, Bush said the treaty would liquidate the last vestiges of the Cold War. However, critics complained that because the warheads will remain intact--2,400 of them in what the U.S. calls “responsive storage,” ready for redeployment--it does nothing to liquidate the Cold War’s weapons.

Graham T. Allison, a former assistant secretary of Defense and a Harvard University expert on Russia, said it matters little whether there are 6,500 nuclear warheads or 2,000 in each country.

“What matters,” he said, is “the probability of use.”

Because the treaty does not address the amount of time that a Russian or U.S. president would have to decide whether to use the weapons in a crisis, he said he would grade it no higher than a “C.”

Such skepticism about the agreement’s importance is echoed by Andrei A. Piontkovsky, director of the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies in Moscow.

“There will never be a nuclear war between Russia and the United States at least in the foreseeable future. This is why the agreement on the new strategic reductions has no practical importance for either country. It is one of those detente documents of the Cold War era, a kind of document which will be completely forgotten in a few years,” he said.

“What is more important is what else the presidents will sign in terms of alliance-forming. The big question is how far this document will go beyond just declarations of intent,” he said.

Piontkovsky singled out the benefits Russia could get from “a real partnership” with the United States over “vital topics like Russia’s role in the world energy market”--it is the world’s second-largest oil producer and its second-largest oil exporter--and its “potentially vulnerable sovereignty in the Far East, where China’s role is becoming more and more assertive.”

Alexander A. Konovalov, president of another Russian think tank, the Institute for Strategic Assessment, said the summit, at its best, would keep intact, perhaps modestly, the process of bilateral arms negotiations, which he said is needed for world stability.

At the start of the Bush administration, Konovalov said, “it was firmly believed that the disarmament control process would be ultimately destroyed, that the American side wouldn’t be inclined to conclude any binding accords but go to unilateral declarations. This could have been a catastrophe for the continuation of the nuclear arms reduction.”

The meeting will be the fourth between Bush and Putin. They last met in November, in Washington and in Crawford, Texas.

Bush will visit St. Petersburg, Putin’s home city, and engage in a question-and-answer session at St. Petersburg State University.

Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Daniszewski from Moscow.