A Times Editorial

U.S. heightens arms tensions

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 27, 2000

Here's a not-so-Trivial Pursuit question: Which world power is taking the lead in nuclear arms reduction? Hint: It's not the United States. Having finally approved the Start II agreement to halve American and Russian strategic arsenals by 2007, the Russian Duma then voted to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty -- a step our hawkish and isolationist Congress refuses to take.

The good news must be heavily qualified. Russian President Vladimir Putin is an unlikely crusader for peace, given the brutal military campaign he has conducted against Chechnya. Yet Putin deserves some credit for recognizing that the Cold War is over. He is moving faster than anyone in Washington to alleviate the worldwide nuclear threat. He also is claiming the moral high ground on arms that used to belong to the United States, insisting he now wants to go ahead with Start III, which would cut nuclear weapons even further.

Putin's reasons for accelerated reductions aren't likely to earn him a Nobel Peace Prize. Bankrupt Russia, with its staggering economic problems, can't afford a new arms race. Nor are the reductions going to happen as neatly or as safely as the treaty would seem to imply. Russia will begin decommissioning only those warheads that are so old they probably could not be used anyway. More troubling, the Russian national security chiefs have lowered the "nuclear threshold," implying that conventional military forces are so debilitated that they think they might be forced to use some nuclear weapons in the face of an external threat. And if the United States goes ahead with its national missile defense system, essentially abandoning the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty, then all bets with Russia may be off. Putin has said that the proposed missile shield would cause him to back away from all Russia's nuclear arms reduction commitments.

At this week's U.N. conference in New York on the 1970 non-proliferation treaty, it seems the Americans look like the bad guys and the Russians look like the good guys. The smaller nuclear nations, such as France and Britain, as well as many non-nuclear states, are disturbed that the United States cannot get its act together on missiles -- on the one hand, criticizing India and Pakistan for carrying out nuclear tests, and on the other refusing to stop testing itself. And, far from making other countries feel more secure, the "Star Wars" program, designed to protect the United States and its allies from "rogue" countries such as North Korea, Libya, Iran and Iraq, seems to have increased the overall tension.

Of course, the story is more complicated. There are hopeful noises from the Kremlin on arms reduction but also disturbing caveats. And the United States isn't helping. The government's insistence that it has the right to forge a nuclear shield and test its weapons whenever it likes will slow down, maybe even halt, a real lowering of the nuclear temperature. And then there is Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has vowed to block any arms-control agreements Clinton sends to the Senate for ratification. "Not on my watch," said Helms, the leader of the Senate's neanderthal wing.

No foreign policy issue is more important than nuclear arms control, but we cannot expect the Russians to do it by themselves. At some point we will have to practice what we've been preaching to the rest of the world for the past 30 years.

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