Nuclear Warheads

WASHINGTON -- The White House welcomed Ukraine's vote for independence and ordered a special emissary to Kiev this week to discuss what it termed "our future relationship" with the breakaway Soviet republic.Administration officials said that Washington was "moving toward full diplomatic recognition" of the Ukraine but would first seek assurances on issues of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, human rights, existing international treaties, national borders and commitments to free market policies and fair trade.

WASHINGTON -- Bomber crews across the nation unloaded their thermonuclear weapons yesterday and ended a decades-long vigil under which such aircraft could take off on 15 minutes' notice if the United States was attacked.This action, ordered by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, was the most immediate, visible and dramatic follow-up to President Bush's far-reaching plan for both unilateral nuclear cuts and new negotiations with Moscow.Announced in a televised speech at the White House on Friday night, the presidential initiatives would bring about "the single biggest change in the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons since they were first integrated into our forces in 1954," Mr. Cheney said at a one-hour Pentagon news conference yesterday.

WASHINGTON -- The new U.S.-Soviet arms treaty will barely dent the Pentagon's $50 billion-a-year strategic nuclear weapons budget, according to government officials and independent analysts.They see the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, signed Wednesday by President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Moscow, as a huge boost to national security -- contributing to international stability and reducing the chances of nuclear war -- but as a near-pygmy in the budget arena.There are three main reasons:* The first, which complicates any estimate of savings, is that the Bush administration cut back several major missile and bomber programs last year, and it is hard for analysts to assess how much that was done for budgetary reasons and how much it was done in anticipation of a treaty.

LONDON -- The United States and the Soviet Union will hold a summit in Moscow at the end of this month to sign a treaty sharply reducing their stockpiles of long-range nuclear missiles, it was announced here yesterday.The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, will mark the first time the two superpowers have agreed to reduce intercontinental nuclear weapons -- those on bombers and sea- and land-based missiles that can reach U.S. or Soviet territory. Talks are expected on even further missile cuts following the ratification of the treaty.

Iraq has the capacity to begin manufacturing and using a small but devastating stock of nuclear missiles, shells and bombs within 10 years, U.S., British and Israeli intelligence experts have concluded.The experts say that Iraq has amply demonstrated that it intends to build a nuclear arsenal from scratch.They add that its engineers could almost certainly begin limited production of nuclear warheads within a decade unless prevented from doing so by foreign military intervention or foreign economic restrictions.