Baltimore Sun

July 31, 1997

[for personal use only]

AIM OF U.S. NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS TO FORCE RUSSIAN DISARMAMENT

United States offers stark choice as nations feel their way in new era

KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON -- For a half-century, U.S. nuclear weapons were aimed at the Communist Soviet Union to deter war. Today, they are aimed at making democratic Russia destroy its own weapons.

The drive to reduce the huge arsenals of the Cold War has stalled, at least temporarily, as the United States and Russia feel their way into a new era.

No longer rivals, they are not exactly allies, either. And in each country, the internal political changes of the last few years are rippling through the dangerous game of nuclear politics.

No one is threatening a new arms race. But the United States is quietly offering Russia a stark choice: Take more nuclear weapons out of service or face a determined U.S. military willing to maintain its nuclear forces, even at a cost of more than $100 billion over the next decade.

"There are two alternative futures here," said U.S. Arms Control Director John Hollum. "We very much favor further reduction. But we're prepared, as the Congress has indicated, to live with the less attractive proposition, with these larger forces."

The pause in destroying the nuclear arsenals left by the Cold War is largely due to the failure of the Duma, Russia's parliament, to ratify the START II arms-control agreement.

When it approved the treaty last year, the Senate insisted on keeping all U.S. strategic weapons until the Duma also ratified it. Only then would half of the 7,000 remaining U.S. strategic weapons -- on board submarines, bombers and missiles -- be taken out of service, as the treaty requires.

Nineteen months later, the Duma still has not voted.

As a result, the Senate this month approved a small but meaningful amount of money for a larger, more expensive nuclear-weapons complex to maintain the arsenal. The Senate added $258 million to the $4 billion the Clinton administration wants to build supercomputers to model nuclear explosions and pave the way for new facilities that make plutonium pits and tritium gas, ingredients of nuclear warheads.

The House hasn't included the new money in its bill, but it usually gives the Senate what it wants on matters involving nuclear weapons.

"START II has not been ratified," said Sen. Pete V. Domenici, a New Mexico Republican and the author of the additional spending with Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat. "So the laboratories are having to maintain a larger number of weapons of more designs than they anticipated."

The Clinton administration, too, is making adjustments to keep up its nuclear arsenal at a time of tight budgets. In recent weeks, planners at the Pentagon, White House and Energy Department have begun weighing a shift: moving some nuclear weapons off costly submarines to cheaper, land-based missiles, according to a senior administration official.

The wariness between the two countries stems, in part, from changes in the political landscapes of both, Hollum said.

"The relationship is more cautious than it had been in the past, largely because the Russians have gone through some negotiated," he said. "We have, too."

The Communist-led coalition in the Duma is wary of the United States. Influential lawmakers there have expressed an interest in building missile defenses and have complained about the expansion of NATO toward Russia's borders, to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Economically crippled, Russia also faces the huge cost of replacing old, multiple-warhead missiles with single-warhead ones at a time it cannot even pay its troops.

In the United States, the Republican Congress is wary of arms-control efforts in general and critical of the Clinton administration for not cracking down on alleged arms-control violations by Russia.

Congress also had second thoughts before agreeing this month to pay $500 million each year to help Russia destroy its nuclear weapons and secure its massive and chaotic complex of nuclear weapons factories, once known as "secret cities."

The price tag for maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons at sea, on bombers and deep in underground bunkers, is huge: $54 billion to $64 billion up to 2003, according to the Pentagon. The cost of maintaining these weapons until about 2007 is another $40 billion.

Clinton and Yeltsin have tried to breathe new life into arms control, most recently at their March summit in Finland, where they gave each other more time, until 2003, to live up to the START II agreement -- once it's ratified. Clinton's promise of another arms treaty, START III, was designed to entice the Duma into acting.

The Clinton administration hopes the Duma will ratify START II in the fall, restoring a reliable rhythm to the business of destroying nuclear weapons. Then the United States would begin taking its weapons out of service.

"The case for [Russia] is so compelling," Hollum said. "There's some basis for believing that, as the Yeltsin government starts to address these issues in a very forceful way, the Duma will be receptive."

---------------------

Johnson's Russia List

#1105

31 July 1997

djohnson@cdi.org