Start Ii

As the United States and the Soviet Union prepare for formal signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty at the Moscow summit 10 days hence, it is suddenly fashionable to dismiss the arms control process as exhausted and irrelevant. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is much to do -- and with a fair degree of urgency -- if the world is to be made a safer place.Because of the collapse of the Soviet empire, there is indeed less danger of an all-out strategic nuclear exchange that could incinerate the planet.

President Barack Obama is facing the first big test of his post-midterm-election presidency in his effort to get a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty ratified by the Senate during the lame-duck session of Congress. In the real world, the stakes are enormous: our relationship with Russia; the chance for meaningful sanctions against the rogue states of Iran and South Korea; the effort to reduce the number of nuclear weapons that could one day go astray — all ride on it. Unfortunately, the view looks different in the crucible of Washington, where Republicans are looking at the matter as determining whether Mr. Obama is still a force to reckoned with in the wake of the Democrats' devastating midterm election losses or if he is a weakened president going into the final two years of his term.

MOSCOW -- The United States has told the Kremlin that it is prepared to negotiate deeper cuts in long-range nuclear arms in an effort to ease Russian fears that the West seeks military advantage.The U.S. proposal could lay the basis for an agreement on the goals of future arms talks at the summit meeting in Helsinki, Finland, this month between President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.It is also intended to prod Russia to ratify the Start II treaty. Signed in 1993, that treaty has languished in the Russian Parliament because of resistance from hard-liners.

1958: President Eisenhower approves Nike-Zeus anti-missile defense. The program dies for lack of funding. 1969: President Nixon announces Safeguard anti-missile system, later scrapped. 1972: Nixon signs ABM Treaty, banning all but limited U.S. and Russian anti-missile systems. The countries also sign SALT I, freezing levels of offensive missiles. 1979: President Carter signs SALT II with Soviets, limiting offensive missiles to 2,400 on each side. Treaty is never ratified. 1983: President Reagan announces Strategic Defense Initiative, or "star wars," space-based anti-missile system.

FIVE MONTHS behind a schedule that would have better served American security interests, the Senate has ratified START II, the most important nuclear arms reduction treaty in history. The pact negotiated by the Bush administration now faces an uncertain future in the Russian parliament, where communists and nationalists hostile to the United States scored important gains in December elections.Washington's delay was the handiwork of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms, who held up the pact to force the Clinton administration to accommodate his demands for consolidation of foreign policy operations.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. and Russian foreign ministers, pressured by the end of George Bush's presidency and Boris N. Yeltsin's troubled hold on power, agreed yesterday to a historic treaty slashing long-range nuclear weapons by about two-thirds.The treaty, fulfilling the two nations' most far-reaching arms control goal, opens the way to a new era focusing on containing the spread of dangerous weapons beyond the Cold War superpowers.The START II agreement, was reached yesterday between U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei A. Kozyrev.

WASHINGTON -- Tacitly admitting failure in his efforts to bluff the Russian parliament into ratifying a key arms control agreement, President Clinton announced yesterday that he will visit Moscow in early September for summit talks with President Boris N. Yeltsin.The decision restores the normal schedule for U.S.-Russia summits, overriding Clinton's previous declaration that he would travel to Moscow only after the Russian State Duma ratified the stalled START II treaty.In a one-paragraph statement, the White House said that Clinton "underscored the vitality of the U.S.-Russian relationship and looks forward to engaging President Boris N. Yeltsin and the Russian leadership on a broad range of issues."

THE START II treaty, which would reduce the current Russian strategic nuclear arsenal by more than 50 percent, is in serious trouble because of inexcusable delays in Senate approval of ratification and congressional attacks on the ABM (anti-ballistic missile) Treaty.Prolonged postponement of the implementation of START II, signed by President George Bush in 1993, would be a major blow to U.S. security and would derail the promising progress in arms control generated by the end of the Cold War and the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

1958: President Eisenhower approves Nike-Zeus anti-missile defense. The program dies for lack of funding. 1969: President Nixon announces Safeguard anti-missile system, later scrapped. 1972: Nixon signs ABM Treaty, banning all but limited U.S. and Russian anti-missile systems. The countries also sign SALT I, freezing levels of offensive missiles. 1979: President Carter signs SALT II with Soviets, limiting offensive missiles to 2,400 on each side. Treaty is never ratified. 1983: President Reagan announces Strategic Defense Initiative, or "star wars," space-based anti-missile system.

George Bush will not be remembered in history as th !B "education president" or the "environment" president," but he is staking a claim on the title of "disarmament president."

MOSCOW -- Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, hoping to smooth U.S.-Russian relations in advance of a critical trip to Washington next week, intensified efforts yesterday to win ratification of the stalled START II missile treaty.The Communist-dominated Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, opened the way Monday to renewed debate on the treaty but set no timetable. In a prime-time television interview, Primakov said ratification of the pact is essential to Russia's long-range security and relations with other countries.

WASHINGTON -- Tacitly admitting failure in his efforts to bluff the Russian parliament into ratifying a key arms control agreement, President Clinton announced yesterday that he will visit Moscow in early September for summit talks with President Boris N. Yeltsin.The decision restores the normal schedule for U.S.-Russia summits, overriding Clinton's previous declaration that he would travel to Moscow only after the Russian State Duma ratified the stalled START II treaty.In a one-paragraph statement, the White House said that Clinton "underscored the vitality of the U.S.-Russian relationship and looks forward to engaging President Boris N. Yeltsin and the Russian leadership on a broad range of issues."

MOSCOW -- The United States has told the Kremlin that it is prepared to negotiate deeper cuts in long-range nuclear arms in an effort to ease Russian fears that the West seeks military advantage.The U.S. proposal could lay the basis for an agreement on the goals of future arms talks at the summit meeting in Helsinki, Finland, this month between President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.It is also intended to prod Russia to ratify the Start II treaty. Signed in 1993, that treaty has languished in the Russian Parliament because of resistance from hard-liners.

DURING 40 YEARS of Cold War, calls for complete elimination of nuclear weapons came to be discredited as just so much big-power propaganda. Both the United States and Russia piously repeated their fealty to this goal. But all along, they added to massive arsenals that constituted an irrational threat to all of humanity.Now, seven years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear abolition is an idea on the way to rehabilitation. What better advocate could there be than retired Gen. George Lee Butler, former head of the Strategic Air Command?

FIVE MONTHS behind a schedule that would have better served American security interests, the Senate has ratified START II, the most important nuclear arms reduction treaty in history. The pact negotiated by the Bush administration now faces an uncertain future in the Russian parliament, where communists and nationalists hostile to the United States scored important gains in December elections.Washington's delay was the handiwork of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms, who held up the pact to force the Clinton administration to accommodate his demands for consolidation of foreign policy operations.

THE START II treaty, which would reduce the current Russian strategic nuclear arsenal by more than 50 percent, is in serious trouble because of inexcusable delays in Senate approval of ratification and congressional attacks on the ABM (anti-ballistic missile) Treaty.Prolonged postponement of the implementation of START II, signed by President George Bush in 1993, would be a major blow to U.S. security and would derail the promising progress in arms control generated by the end of the Cold War and the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

MOSCOW -- If nostalgia enveloped George Bush on his 25th and probably final foreign adventure as president, there was also some nostalgia for the old sureties of traditional arms control.The second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as START II, given its very sweep, is likely to be the last agreement of its kind. It represents both the triumph and the limit of bilateral negotiations on arms control in a world that is no longer bipolar.The Soviet Union may have been a totalitarian menace, but its military commanders -- especially in comparison with the military commanders in some of the world's current trouble spots -- were responsible professionals who knew the dangers of the weapons they brandished or faced, and who could largely be expected to keep to the letter of the agreements they signed, however long or hard the negotiation.

President Bush has every right to feel gratified by the giant steps on nuclear disarmament that have occurred on his watch, the culmination being the START I and II treaties to reduce superpower strategic arsenals by two-thirds in the next decade. He has every right, too, to hope President-elect Clinton does not make the mistake he committed early in his administration by letting diplomacy with Moscow lag to the detriment of a detente-minded, democracy-minded Russian leader.In Mr. Bush's case, the delay stemmed from a perverse "status-quo plus" strategy that helped undermine the position of former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

MOSCOW -- Millions of Russians will turn out today for an election whose importance may be determined more by the reaction to the result than the result itself.Whatever answers the Russian voters give to the question of President Boris N. Yeltsin's popularity and what sort of a political structure they favor, the election will shift the ground under the feet of the contestants -- Mr. Yeltsin and his opponents in the Russian legislature -- and the ramifications could be deep and long-lasting.

Moscow.-- Accompaning the meeting of American and Russian presidents this weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia, there is much ballyhoo about the transformation from cold-war enmity to partnership. Indeed, on issues ranging from the Yugoslav crisis to the global economy, Russia under Boris Yeltsin now talks the same language as the West.But as President Clinton will soon discover, Mr. Yeltsin's political troubles make it very difficult for him to deliver on promises of cooperation.Both foreign policy and economic reform are increasingly being held hostage to domestic political pressures, particularly in the weeks leading up to an April 25 referendum on Mr. Yeltsin's rule, observers say."