Nuclear arms deal marks 'end of Cold War'

Published on Tuesday 14 May 2002 01:00

PRESIDENT George Bush yesterday hailed an agreement with Russia to cut the two countries’ nuclear arsenals by two-thirds as a move that would "liquidate the legacy of the Cold War".

The president said the agreement would usher in a new phase in US-Russian relations. "The new era will be a period of enhanced mutual security, economic security and improved relations," he said.

There was some scepticism on both sides, however, that the three-page treaty, to be signed at a summit in Moscow between President Bush and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow on 23-26 May, represented the milestone in international arms control the White House and the Kremlin claimed.

Under the agreement, the United States and Russia will reduce the two countries’ nuclear arsenals to an agreed upon range of 1,700 to 2,200 warheads. The United States currently has about 7,000 strategic nuclear weapons, Russia about 6,000.

In a political victory for Mr Putin, the agreement will give Russia the binding treaty it has sought. Russia has pressed for a formal, signed treaty, while Mr Bush, seeking to avoid a confrontation with the Democrat-dominated Senate, said an oral agreement would have sufficed.

However, the agreement also gives Washington the flexibility to store some weapons rather than dismantle them all, a clause Moscow wanted in the treaty. "What you have here is a deal in which Russia got a treaty and we got everything else," said analyst Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

The deal removes, at least temporarily, a potential stumbling block to US plans to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (ABM) and deploy a missile defence system over Russian objections.

Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, dismissed suggestions that the deal failed to meet Moscow’s concerns to ensure that reductions were real and verifiable. He described the deal as not "overly ambitious" but nonetheless important.

The ABM treaty was a landmark agreement between the US and the former Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. It was signed in Moscow on 26 May 1972 by then US President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Under its terms, each side was allowed to have one limited anti-ballistic missile system to protect its capital and another to protect an intercontinental ballistic missile launch area.

The two sites were to be at least 812 miles apart to prevent the creation of any effective regional defence zone or the beginnings of a nationwide system - such as the one the US now wants to develop.

After their meeting in Washington in September 1994 Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin declared their full support for ABM while agreeing to co-operate in developing and fielding a "theatre missile defence system".

This co-operation failed to materialise, however. Although at one point President Clinton considered the idea of a national missile defence system he dropped it as being incompatible with Washington’s ABM treaty commitments.

President Bush revived NMD shortly after taking office, to heated condemnation from Moscow. However, yesterday’s agreement appears to have confounded critics of NMD who have said that it would set off a new arms race with Russia.

Despite Moscow’s opposition to NMD and the scrapping of ABM, Mr Bush has nevertheless struck up a warm personal relationship with Mr Putin and the two leaders earlier this year held talks on a new strategic relationship. Since then, Russia has muted its criticisms of the missile defence plans, though some Russian academics maintain that it runs counter to Moscow’s interests.

Robert Einhorn, an arms control expert of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said the new deal was an important sign that the two countries could work together on major issues.

However, Mr Einhorn said key details, such as the ultimate fate of the weapons slated for reduction and how they are to be securely stored, had yet to be negotiated.

There was even more scepticism in the Russian camp. "Both sides will do what they want to do," said Pavel Podvig, a researcher at the Centre for Arms Control in Moscow. He pointed out that the new accord covered only "operationally deployed" warheads, a term that left a lot of room for interpretation. "Without the definition of what kind of warheads they are talking about, it will be meaningless," he said.

Vladimir Dvorkin, a retired Russian major general and former top arms control negotiator who is now adviser to the Moscow-based PIR research centre, said he was treating the announcement with "cautious optimism".

"The United States has shown how it regards treaties," Gen Dvorkin said, referring to the Bush administration’s decision to pull out of the ABM treaty to pursue its defence shield.

Indeed, the lesson of Washington’s scrapping of the ABM treaty appears not to have been lost on Russia’s arms negotiators. In a hint of possible snags to come, Georgy Mamedov, the deputy foreign minister and chief negotiator, said the treaty, like ABM, will include a clause allowing either party to pull out "in case of a threat to national interests".

Arms race that slowed with end of Cold War

1945 - United States drops atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

1949 - The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb.

1950s - The Cold War accelerates.

1957 - The Soviet Union launches Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite.

1961 - The Berlin Wall is built. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba fails.

1962 - Cuban missile crisis.

1968 - Talks between the US and Soviet Union on arms limitations cancelled when Moscow invades Czechoslovakia in August.

1972 - President Richard Nixon and the Soviet general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, sign the SALT I agreement, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

1979 - In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter withdraws the SALT II treaty from Senate consideration.

1982 - The Soviet Union and US begin Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START).

1983 - President Ronald Reagan announces that the US will start research on a national missile defence programme - "Star Wars".

1986 - An agreement to reduce strategic nuclear arms collapses at a US-Soviet summit in Reykjavik.

1987 - Mr Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sign the INF Treaty, banning ground-launched, medium-range nuclear missiles.

1989 - The Berlin Wall falls.

1991 - President George Bush, Sr, and Mikhail Gorbachev sign the START I Treaty. The Soviet Union disbands.

1993 - President Bush and President Boris Yeltsin sign START II.

2000 - President Bill Clinton decides not to authorise research on on national missile defence (NMD).

2001 - May: President George Bush, Jr, says the US needs NMD.

July: Mr Bush and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, agree to link US plans for building NMD to talks on reducing nuclear stockpiles.

October: The Pentagon puts off missile tests to avoid violating the ABM Treaty.

November: Mr Bush and Mr Putin fail to reach a compromise on NMD.

December: Mr Bush says he will withdraw from the ABM Treaty.

2002 - Mr Bush announces he will sign a treaty to reduce US and Russian nuclear arsenals to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads from 6,000.