WASHINGTON -- By many measures, international arms control seems to be on the verge of unraveling.

A global treaty banning all nuclear testing is bottled up in the United States Senate.

Another pact to reduce the atomic arsenals of Russia and the United States is stalled in the Russian Parliament.

Iraq, Iran and North Korea are racing to build new biological, chemical, nuclear weapons or long-range missiles, American intelligence analysts say. Finally worn down by Iraqi non-cooperation, the United Nations has dismantled its efforts even to monitor Iraq's terror-weapons programs. And India and Pakistan are menacing each other with nuclear-tipped missiles.

"We're heading downhill," said Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, a group that researches arms control and international security.

"All of the major fault lines of nuclear danger are growing."

Why then are many arms control advocates echoing the bullish declaration of Adm. Stansfield Turner, a past director of Central Intelligence: "This is the most opportune moment in the past 40 years for nuclear arms control"?

The answer is simple: Russia, which is still the only country that can claim parity with America's own nuclear arsenal, has serious reasons for wanting to cut back its stock of warheads.

Russia's strategic forces are declining fast and Moscow lacks the money to pay for new systems.

It badly wants a new strategic arms reduction agreement, Start 3, that could take both countries down to 1,500 long-range nuclear warheads from more than 6,000 currently; from the Russian point of view, that would at least allow Russia to keep even with the United States despite all its troubles.

roponents of such a deal argue that it would have advantages for the United States as well: It would shrink the nuclear stockpile of the country that still harbors the single biggest threat to American security, and from which American security officials fear that terrorists may even now be shopping for nuclear material.

And with instability engulfing Russia, including growing public cynicism toward the government, rising corruption with allegations of Russian laundering of billions of dollars through the Bank of New York and the economy shakier than ever, time may be running short to strike a bold new arms deal before both countries hold presidential elections next year, experts say.

"We have a way to secure extremely deep cuts, and make them verifiable and irreversible," said Mr. Krepon.

"In return for doing Russia that favor, which is a favor to ourselves, we can get a number of things we want."

But the Administration is proceeding gingerly, still insisting that Russia's Communist-dominated Parliament first ratify the Start 2 treaty, which brings both nations' strategic forces to 3,000 to 3,500 warheads, before seriously negotiating any follow-on pact to further reduce the weaponry.

And even though the cold war is over, the logic of nuclear arms control has detractors. The Pentagon and many conservatives fear that dipping much lower than 3,000 warheads would jeopardize the American nuclear advantage over the rest of the world, and encourage other countries to seek the status of first-tier atomic powers.

Moreover, Washington's insistence that the Russian Parliament act on Start 2 may have backfired, angering many Russian lawmakers who complain of American coercion.

"They are trying to portray us as a country unwilling to divest itself of nuclear arms, a kind of nuclear monster that does not want to disarm," Roman Popkovich, chairman of the defense committee of Russia's lower house of Parliament, said last month.

Yet another hurdle is the strained relationship between Moscow and Washington, frayed most recently by the air war in Kosovo. "Things are at such a low level of credibility with Russia right now," said Senator Pete Domenici, a senior Republican from New Mexico.

"A lot of work has to be done."

That is why Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the Administration's top Russia expert, plans to fly to Moscow this week to try to smooth out differences in advance of a more important meeting in Washington on Sept. 17 with a Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Georgi Mamedev.

Against long odds, Mr. Talbott is trying to broker a deal to modify the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to allow the United States to build a limited national defense against long-range missile attacks -- in exchange, perhaps, for a Start 3 agreement.

Russia has long opposed such a shield, fearing it could lead to a broader "Star Wars" space-based defensive system.

But missile defenses are a top foreign-policy priority of Senate Republicans like Jesse Helms of North Carolina, whose Foreign Relations Committee is likely to hold the nuclear-test ban treaty hostage until President Clinton submits two other treaties that Mr. Helms wants to kill, including amendments to the A.B.M. Treaty.

The Administration's deliberate approach illustrates a shift in the politics of arms control, which became the lifeblood of America's foreign policy during the last half of the cold war, arms control advocates say.

It was just a few years ago that President Clinton presided over the extension of a treaty to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Those accomplishments capped an astonishing 10-year period for American arms control policy that included landmark strategic arms reductions treaties negotiated by President George Bush.

Mr. Clinton, arms control advocates say, has lost the momentum created in his first Administration. Gone is the initiative of President's first four years, they say, replaced by drift and a reluctance to challenge Senate conservatives.

"It's a very timid approach and time is running out," said Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr., president of the Arms Control Association, a research and advocacy group. "They've had a failed policy in dealing effectively with the Senate, because of a feeling that a confrontation on this would hurt the rest of their domestic agenda."

If the Administration is to pull off one more arms control victory in its waning months, it can expect little or no help from Senate Republicans, who are moving away from the arms control legacy of the Bush and Reagan Administrations, to push for national missile defenses.

"We don't want to unnecessarily antagonize the Russians, but they are not the Soviet Union," said Senator Gordon H. Smith, an Oregon Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

"They're not the threat they once were.

The threat is more dispersed now."

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