WASHINGTON, May 13 - There is a reason the nuclear arms treaty President Bush plans to sign at the coming Moscow summit meeting is only three pages long. It is intended to provide maximum flexibility to the Pentagon.

The new accord does not require the destruction of a single missile launcher or warhead. Each side can carry out the reductions at its own pace, or even reverse them and temporarily build up its forces. The only real constraint is that each side must have no more than 1,700 to 2,200 warheads at the end of 2012. At that point, the treaty is set to expire, leaving each side free to have as many weapons as it would like unless the accord is extended.

"What we have now agreed to do under the treaty is what we wanted to do anyway," a senior administration official said today. "That's our kind of treaty."

In other words, it is a fitting agreement for Pentagon planners who are more concerned about protecting the United States' nuclear options than constraining those of the Russians. It marks a break with traditional approaches to arms control.

While arms control can be a highly technical enterprise, the logic of the Bush administration's new approach to nuclear weapons treaties is fairly simple. Throughout the cold war, the United States saw arms control as a way to contain the Soviet nuclear threat and constrain Moscow's ability to carry out a first strike.

The Pentagon's big worry was that the Soviet Union would outpace the United States in an arms race in which each side rushed to deploy new missiles and warheads. American defense officials were especially anxious about the Soviets' heavy SS-18 land-based missile, which carries 10 warheads and was code-named Satan by NATO planners. That ability gave Washington an enormous stake in arms agreements that had strict provisions mandating weapons cuts and that forced the Russians to give
up their most threatening weapons.

Negotiating a ban on land-based missiles with multiple warheads like the SS-18 was a top priority for the first Bush administration. With the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet military, however, the Pentagon has a very different set of priorities. The Pentagon is counting on Russia's beleaguered economy to force a contraction in the Russian nuclear arsenal. Its primary goal now is not to constrain the Russian nuclear force but to maintain its own flexibility in planning the American one.

The Pentagon's new philosophy was spelled out in its classified Nuclear Posture Review. That study called for reducing the United States arsenal to the level of 1,700 to 2,200 - precisely the limit that the new treaty says the two sides must reach by the end of 2012. According to the study, the planned force will consist of 14 Trident missile-carrying submarines, 500 Minuteman III land-based missiles, 76 B-52H bombers and 21 B-2 bombers. 

Even that force, the Pentagon says, may not be sufficient given an uncertain world or what the Pentagon prefers to call "potential contingencies." If relations with Russia or China worsen, administration officials say, the United States may need to expand its nuclear arsenal quickly. 

President Bush may talk about building relations with a new Russia that is no longer an adversary, but the agreement he plans to sign is intended to keep open Washington's option to expand its nuclear arsenal if relations with Moscow sour.

Under the agreement, for example, the Pentagon expects to reduce its arsenal gradually so that it shrinks the strategic nuclear force from around 6,000 warheads today to 1,700 to 2,200 at the end of 2012, a significant cut. But if tensions rose with Moscow or China, the United States could suspend the reductions for a few years or even increase the arsenal without violating the treaty.

"In the event that U.S. relations with Russia significantly worsen in the future, the U.S. may need to revise its nuclear force level and posture," the Pentagon said in its nuclear review. The United States is under no obligation to extend the treaty when it lapses after 10 years. The agreement also contains an escape hatch: each side can withdraw on three months' notice. That is half the amount of time required to withdrawn from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of  1972.

Nor is there any link in the treaty to the issue of missile defenses, as Moscow once insisted.

To obtain such a degree of flexibility, the Bush administration had to make concessions. The accord will be legally binding, as the Russians have insisted. Bush administration hard-liners initially resisted doing even that, but Russia wanted a binding accord to make the nuclear balance more predictable and put some limits on the Americans.

"The Russians got a treaty, and the U.S. got its flexibility," said Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "The U.S. can go down when it wants to, and it can go back up when it needs to. That is what Bush set out to accomplish in his new nuclear policy." Because the Bush administration insisted on maximum flexibility in planning its arsenal, it also had to allow Moscow the freedom to plan its strategic forces.

As a result, the Russians will be free to deploy new land-based missiles with multiple warheads, such as the three-warhead version of the SS-27, and to keep old ones like the SS-18. The ban on land-based missiles with multiple warheads, which President Bush's father so actively promoted as a way to eliminate the most destabilizing weapons, has essentially been cast aside.

It is cheaper to put several warheads on a missile than to build a missile for each warhead. So this gives Moscow a cost-effective way to maintain its nuclear arsenal - or expand it should the United States field an effective missile defense.

That point has not been lost on some of the skeptics. Mr. Daalder observed,  "Maximum flexibility is a two-way street."

The mainstream media seems to have (deliberately?) missed the basic fact that existing and proposed arms control treaties (including the START I and II treaties) deal essentially with nuclear weapons platforms -- weapns systems which support DEPLOYED strategic warheads. Both the US and Russia have and will continue to maintain "hedge stockpiles" of more than 10,000 thermonuclear weapons, along with thousands of plutonium "pits" which are the fissionable triggers for nuclear weapons (once known as hydrogen bombs).

The failure to underline the difference between DEPLOYED strategic warheads and STOCKPILED strategic warheads deliberately confuses the issues of nuclear arms reductions. Thus the illusion of reductions is maintained, while the warheads are quietly put into storage in case they are ever "needed" for nuclear war.

If you care to verify what I am saying, go to the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (www.thebulletin.org) and do a little research. Go to the "back issues" section and key in the words "hedge stockpile". See what you get.

Here is a quote from a relatively current issue: "The U.S. stockpile is divided into four categories--active, "hedge" (or augmentation), inactive reserve, and retired (awaiting dismantlement). By the end of 2000, the dismantlement work at Pantex will be almost complete, leaving approximately 10,500 weapons in the active, inactive reserve, and hedge categories." This number has not changed significantly in the last two years, and will not change significantly under any proposed arms control agreements.

There is a difference between 4000 deployed strategic nuclear weapons and 20,000 stockpiled nuclear weapons, a difference which seems lost upon the mainstream reporters of these issues.

However, the difference in numbers will matter little if nuclear war breaks out. Another recent study (which you can also find in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2001/ja01/ja01lortie.html ) details that a single US Trident sub can kill 50 million Russian civilians with 192 nuclear warheads . . . so imagine what 4000 can do. Ever hear of nuclear winter?

I appreciate the intent to educate on nuclear matters . . . but this article is not the place to start.

Sincerely,
Steven Starr

The proposed reduction in Russian and US warheads has been well-trailed since the start of the Bush presidency and was the subject of some discussion at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference in New York last month.

In her report from the NPT Carol said:

The willingness of the US and Russia to decrease current warhead numbers is part of the strategy to replace some of them with new, reduced yield 'bunker busters' and medium range delivery systems which will lower the  nuclear threshold.

Also aired at the NPT was the problem with 'handshake diplomacy' instead of nuclear disarmament agreements which include detailed clauses about verification and transparency.

"Storing surplus warheads for possible future use is not nuclear disarmament" said Carol Naughton, "and the legacy of the Cold War will only be liquidated when the last warhead has been dismantled and the doctrine which fed it has been consigned to the history books."

Further information from Press Officer Nigel Chamberlain on 07968 420859

In a carefully orchestrated move, US President George W. Bush and Putin announced Monday that the two sides had clinched an agreement to reduce their nuclear arsenals from 6,000 warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next 10 years after an apparently dramatic breakthrough at
high-level talks in Moscow.

The agreement, marking a new era of US-Russian ties, paves the way for the two leaders to sign a landmark disarmament treaty when they meet in Moscow and Saint Petersburg on May 23-26. But from the very beginning, Moscow had no choice but to agree to a deal on US terms, experts said.

"Russia entered talks with a very weak hand, as it has to cut the number of its warheads in any event since it does not have the means to keep them all, and the United States knows it," said respected military analyst Alexander Goltz.

The very fact that Washington agreed to cut the same number of warheads as Moscow is an achievement in itself, said Andrey Piontkovsky, who heads the Moscow-based Center for Strategic Research.

"Russia would have cut the number of its warheads down to 1,500 anyway for financial reasons, so this is really an agreement on the reduction of the US arsenal," Piontkovsky said. "The only thing Russia really won is that it will get a legally binding agreement," Goltz concurred.

While Russia had insisted on inking a formal deal, Washington initially favored a "gentlemen's agreement" but finally bowed to Moscow's demand. However, the lack of options on the Russian side meant that the United States could impose its will on other issues, particularly regarding the method for counting warheads, Goltz argued. "What just happened is that Russia dropped all its objections to US criteria," he said.

Both analysts believed Monday's breakthrough was made possible by the fact that both sides finally agreed to count the number of launchers each could keep, rather than to focus solely on the number of warheads. "The process of verification (of the treaty) should focus on launchers,"
Piontkovsky said.

This way of counting will make it easier for Washington to store part of the decommissionned warheads, instead of destroying all of them as Russia insisted.

"Given that the United States will only have enough launchers for 1,700 warheads, the fact that they keep 4,000 warheads in storage will not matter, so they should be able to keep them," Piontkovsky said.

Moscow has until now insisted it wanted all strategic offensive weapons to be destroyed, whereas Washington has said it wanted some to be mothballed so they could be redeployed in times of crisis. Both sides also differ on how to control the arms reduction process, as well as on the ways of opting out of the new treaty.

Piontkovsky blamed the length of the negotiations on US hawks such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, while Goltz said it had more to do with domestic Russian politics. "I think that Putin always was in favor of an agreement, but that he had
to take into account the opposition of his generals and of the Communists," Goltz said, adding that stretching out the negotiations helped to appease the Russian president's own hawks. "Putin carried out protracted talks to show that he was puting up a fight until the very end," he said.

Russia and the United States have gone through a bumpy negotiation process before striking a deal, with officials on both sides saying last month there was no guarantee an accord could be reached in time for the Bush-Putin summit.

The treaty calls for reducing the size of the actively deployed US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals from some 6,000 weapons on each side today to between 1,700 and 2,200 by the year 2012. This is approximately a two-thirds reduction in actively deployed long-range nuclear weapons, a move that is certainly positive.

The treaty, however, has serious flaws. The nuclear weapons taken off active deployment will not necessarily be destroyed. It will be up to each country to determine what to do with these weapons. Many, if not most, of them will be placed in storage, ready to be rapidly redeployed if either country decides to do so.

There is also no immediacy to moving from current levels of strategic nuclear weapons to the promised lower levels. According to the terms of the treaty, each country needs only to reduce to the agreed upon levels by the year 2012. That also happens to be the year that the treaty terminates unless extended.

The United States has been a proponent of making the nuclear reductions reversible. The major problem with this approach is that it leads the Russians to do the same, and thereby increases the likelihood that these weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists. It would be better for both countries to permanently dismantle the nuclear weapons removed from active deployment, thereby removing the risk of theft by terrorists.

The treaty deals only with strategic or long-range nuclear weapons. It does not seek to control or reduce tactical or short-range nuclear weapons. Each side still retains thousands of these weapons, and there is serious concern about the Russian arsenal's vulnerability to theft or unauthorized use. The US Nuclear Posture Review, made partially public in January 2002, called for the development of so-called "bunker buster" nuclear weapons that would be far more likely to actually be used than the larger long-range nuclear weapons.

As we evaluate this treaty, we should remember that even at the lowest level of 1,700 strategic nuclear weapons on each side, there will still be a sufficient number to destroy more than 3,000 cities. The use of far fewer nuclear weapons than this would put an end to civilization as we know 
it.

President Bush claims, "This treaty will liquidate the legacy of the Cold War." This remains to be seen. By designing a treaty that will hold so many nuclear weapons in reserve and retain so many on active "hair-trigger" alert, the two sides are not exactly demonstrating a level of trust commensurate with their current friendly relations.

When the treaty is examined closely, it has more the feel of a public relations effort than a solid step toward reducing nuclear dangers and fulfilling the long-standing promises of the two countries to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament. Unfortunately, even if this treaty is ratified and enters into force, we will remain in the danger zone that nuclear weapons pose to humanity and all life.

We still need an agreement that provides for deeper, more comprehensive and irreversible cuts with a far greater sense of urgency. Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin need to return to the negotiating table.