Nikolayev reminded of the fact that recently, the State Duma had ratified a package of documents connected with the ABM, START-II and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Nikolayev underlined that the fact that Russia has ratified these documents "is of tremendous importance both for Russia and all other states of the world." Now, we must go ahead in matters of disarmament, it is necessary to continue the tendency of nuclear weapons reduction, Nikolayev said.

The U.S. believes that in the next stage of nuclear weapons reduction nuclear warheads should approximately number 3,500. "As for our position, Russian analysts believe that it will suffice if the number of nuclear weapons is reduced to 2,500 under the future START-III, while according to estimates made by Russian experts it will be sufficient for Russia to have 1,500-2,000 nuclear warheads," Nikolayev said.

Throughout the entire period during which Russia possesses nuclear weapons "not a single accident involving nuclear warheads has occurred," Nikolayev said. Russia has managed to ensure high reliability of its nuclear weapons. All nuclear weapons withdrawn from Russia's nuclear arsenals should be eliminated rather than stockpiled, Nikolayev said.

The Russian MP pointed out that the ratification of international treaties in the field of disarmament by the State Duma is of great international and internal importance, which proves our adherence to peace.

This possibility in the face of a common threat cannot be ruled out, he said.

If the U.S. goes ahead with its plans, "the world will be a very unpleasant place to live in," Rogov said.

"If the Americans respond to ratification of START II by deploying an anti-missile system within years, a very serious crisis in [Russia's] relations with the States and the West as a whole may ensue," he said. The United States "is tempted into achieving superiority [over Russia] in both offensive and defensive weapons," Rogov said. To make this possible, the United States must add 2% to 3% of its annual budget to defense spending, he said. "This amount is laughable for the United States of today which does not know where to invest its money," Rogov said.

"Well-known experts such as Zbigniew Brzezinski call for that. Clinton does not want this but he would not object to gaining additional advantages by using Russia's weakness," he said.

"Russia's GDP has halved in five years while that of the United States has increased 1.5-fold, our national budget has shrunk to just over one tenth of what it was while that of the United States has doubled," Rogov said.

"I have never ordered a unilateral ceasefire and I will not," Maskhadov said in an interview to be published Friday by the weekly Le Point. "We agree to stop fighting if the Russians also stop their offensive," Le Point quotes the Chechen leader as saying, without giving the date or location of the interview.

Maskhadov's whereabouts is a deepening mystery and Russia's intelligence service was reported Wednesday as saying that the Chechen president was ready to surrender and might have already quit his war-torn republic. The Chechen leader challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin in the interview saying "he lacks experience and does not have long term political vision.

"When he realises that this war is pointless, that there is no way out and that his army will be terribly humiliated, he will stop fighting." Maskhadov called for a meeting with Russia to sign a ceasefire agreement saying "we are ready to start discussions with Russia which should not dictate conditions for such a meeting."

"My proposals are clear: once the fighting stops and Russian troops withdraw, I would like to see observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Chechnya.

"They will guarantee that the Russians do not meddle in internal Chechen affairs," Maskhadov said.

An ITAR-TASS report Tuesday claimed Chechen warlords Khattab and Shamil Basayev had threatened to execute Maskhadov's family after the president reportedly offered to engage Moscow in peace talks. Russian authorities said Wednesday they had not been in contact with the Chechen president since an exchange of peace proposals over a month ago. The Kremlin has repeatedly stressed that it viewed Maskhadov, whose January 1997 election as president of the North Caucasus republic was recognized as legitimate by the OSCE, as a war criminal.

“If shooting breaks out, duck down and don’t jump out of the truck”, the lieutenant colonel said slamming the door then took his Kalashnikov back from me. “Experience shows that those who remain in the cab stay alive. Don’t mind if I smoke?”

“Of course not”, - I answered automatically, trying to figure out where I would duck down­ the cab was cramped; three people could not even sit here comfortably, let shelter from bullets on the floor. The lieutenant colonel threw a glance at the convoy and flicked the ash from his cigarette out of the window, covered with a bullet proof vest. “Let’s go.”

The huge Ural truck let out a roar and we were off. Grozny was less than three hours away through ‘peaceful’ Chechen territory…

Spring in Chechnya is a beautiful sight: trees blossoming with pink and white flowers and fresh grass sprouting all around, covering the Terkski Mountain Ridge. The military give it one short word ­ ‘Zelionka’ (greenery). The word has only ominous connotations for the federals in Chechnya; it means that many soldiers and officers will not see home again. Guerilla warfare has broken out under the cover of those trees, a scenario denied as soon ago as March by the then commander of the Federal Army Group in Chechnya, general Kasantsev. At the time he declared that a guerilla war could not be waged because the rebel fighters lack the support of the local population. A little more than a month later and we keep hearing about the terrible losses of soldiers from all over Russia ­ from Sergiev Posad, Pskov, Perm, Tula…

In the course of the present month, federal forces have lost 180 men and some 300 have been wounded. But these are the official figures. The real losses, according to the military themselves, may well be two or three times higher. Almost every day the military airport in Mozdok receives helicopters and trucks carrying the ‘cargo-200’ ­ as the cargoes of soldiers’ and officers’ corpses are called in military documents. The dead are arriving not only from the mountains. A lot of people are killed in ‘peaceful’, liberated territories, supposedly under the control of the Federals. The rebels regularly attack check-points and ambush convoys in the so called lliberated territories

Now ­ with the appearance of the greenery­ camouflaged rebel fighters have only to bend their heads and you cannot tell from which bush the fire came. Neither bulletproof vests, covering the windows, nor submachine guns help. You have no idea where to aim in the surrounding copse. Where did that shot come from? The only hope is to pull through.

Alexei, the cheerful driver of the Ural truck leading the convoy, has been in Chechnya since September, almost the very beginning of this campaign ”I volunteered. There’s nothing to do in barracks, It’s boring there. It’s true that they shoot at us every day. Almost. Well, I wasn’t attacked often. We’re stationed in Grozny and only go to Mozdok to our storehouses. When it happens to me, I just put my foot on the floor. On the whole we pull through… Several men have been hit though.”

Our lieutenant colonel interrupts the conversation:

“You’d better watch the road, hero…”

He wants to sees that everything’s OK... On the whole he is certainly well meaning towards myself. He, unlike many service men in Chechnya, does not have a grudge against the media. To the contrary: When I asked for a lift to Grozny, he just said: “Get into the cab.” Even the lads from the checkpoint asked how I was. Half an hour earlier they had taken me off another convoy in order to inspect my papers. It turned out that there was nothing suspicious about me and after I gave them a bundle of fresh Moscow papers and a can of good coffee, they even began to show a liking for me. Here, on the border between Osetia and Chechnya, the OMON elite police detachments change duty once a day. As to the military transport police, they live right here ­ in a brick house without electricity or water: someone had cut the cable a week before I arrived so they have to use candles: no one wants to look for the damaged sector under sniper fire. Peaceful territories…

And all this begins right on the border with Osetia:

It seemed like the lieutenant colonel was thinking about the same thing:

“Those boys an the checkpoints (OMON, Military Transport Police), really risk their lives, - he suddenly says. ­ What do they have? Well, a machine gun. An APC… But If something serious happened, where would they shoot? They’d never get out of there alive.”

The convoy was moving slowly, the older military trucks were lagging behind and some broke down.

“They’ve stretched out as far as Chernokozovo, - grumbles the lieutenant-colonel and orders the driver: Slow down, Alexei. We’ll have to wait.”

We stop near a small market which are abundant in the Caucasus, but here they look strange, against a background of bombed buildings and the cut electricity lines. It may sound strange but you can buy anything here ­ including Snickers chocolate bars. The prices are almost as high as in Moscow. The sellers live near here and purchase their goods in the neighboring republics of Osetiya and Ingusheta. This is not as difficult it might sound ­ a minibus from Nazran to a place as far as Grozny will cost you about 20 rubles ($0.70). It is not clear whether the whole thing is worth it. The principal customers here are the military, but they rarely buy anything except for water and cigarettes. And the officers try to avoid these markets because they don’t trust the local inhabitants.

It’s best not to ask the military about the civilian population. Even the most reserved answer contains unexpected bitterness: “There’s no civilian population here! In daytime they are civilians, true. Look at them selling goods. But at night they get a submachine gun from the cellar and start shooting at us.”

The truck stopped next to the gates of the military base I was looking for. “Be careful around here”, - I shook hands with the lieutenant colonel and I jumped out into a Grozny street. “Good luck!” ­ they don’t say “see you later” in the war.

On that day, the explosion of the no. 4 reactor sent radioactive dust over the Western portions of what was then the Soviet Union as well as over its East European satellites.

Initially, Soviet officials reacted as they always did before, first with silence and then with denial. But because the radioactivity also spread to Western Europe and because Soviet authorities were unable to prevent people in its empire from learning the facts about the accident, Moscow changed its approach and began to release some information about the tragedy.

That marked the real beginning of "glasnost," the policy of openness that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev used to defeat his conservative opponents but also one that made a major contribution to the destruction of the country over which he and the Communist Party ruled.

At the time, that political fallout of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster attracted almost as much attention as the radioactive kind. But since then, its medical impact--the increased incidence of cancers among those exposed, the mounting number of deaths, and the continuing environmental degradation--has attracted most of the attention. Given the scope of these medical consequences, that is entirely appropriate. But just as was the case 14 years ago, the Chornobyl disaster continues to have three kinds of political fallout which still affect both the people and the governments of this region.

First of all, the Chornobyl accident remains in the minds of many as a symbol of Moscow's insensitivity to the dangers of nuclear power and its willingness to put Ukrainians, Belarusians, and others at particular risk. Only a few weeks before the accident, Soviet authorities gave a cash award to an engineer in Belarus who said that Soviet reactors were so safe that there was no need to build containment walls around them. And at the time of the accident, Moscow had concentrated nuclear power plants in Ukraine, Belarus, and western portions of the Russian Federation.

Ostensibly, Moscow did so to position itself to sell electricity to its East European satellites, but many in Ukraine and Belarus have said that they believed Moscow chose to do so to put Ukrainians and Belarusians at risk should something go wrong.

Both Moscow's handling of the accident at the time and its unwillingness to help out significantly with the consequences of the accident have only further deepened the anger of many Ukrainians at what they see as the latest example of a Russian policy directed at them. Second, Western Europe's insistence that Ukraine close down Chornobyl and its unwillingness to provide the assistance Kyiv believes necessary to create an alternative source of power have infuriated many in Ukraine and in Belarus who expected that the West would help them to recover from this most dramatic of Soviet-era disasters on their territory.

No Ukrainian politician suffered as much from this combination of Western insistence and failure to pay as did former Belarusian President Stanislau Shushkevich, a nuclear physicist who exposed Soviet duplicity on Chornobyl in his republic and who campaigned on the expectation that the West would help him clean up this disaster.

But the doubts many Ukrainian leaders already had about the willingness of the West to help were only exacerbated by this series of events, and these doubts in turn have affected the attitudes these Ukrainian leaders have adopted on other issues as well.

And third, the Ukrainian authorities themselves have suffered a loss of popular support because of their failure to find the funds to help overcome the Chornobyl disaster. Ukrainian officials say that they need to spend approximately $830 million a year just to help the victims of Chornobyl but that they have only $290 million in this year's budget to do so.

In presenting the text, Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov stressed that "Russian military doctrine has an absolutely defensive character." Of course, this is hardly surprising. During the wars in Chechnya, Russia has lost tens of thousands of servicemen, dead and wounded, while fighting a relatively small band of rebels. And there is still no true victory in sight. The military is not ready for any serious offensive actions; military and political leaders know that and are not overly aggressive. But the Soviet Union, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, was also strategically in a defensive posture.

The Soviet leadership was afraid of the West; the Kremlin knew that an "unholy" alliance of NATO and Communist China was more than five times stronger both economically and in terms of manpower. Kremlin leaders believed that NATO and China could transform this might into 800 field divisions and easily crush the Soviet bloc.

The immense Soviet arms buildup during the Cold War was more a deterrent than a preparation for global aggression. To outnumber the enemy, the Soviet Union developed a huge mobilization system, first deployed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. In the 1930s, the Kremlin rapidly industrialized Russia, and almost all new industry had built-in mobilization potential: Tractor factories could also make tanks, and so on.

In fact, all Soviet industry was built to make tanks, war planes, guns and metals and components for military use. But in peace time, industry produced none of the commodities needed to keep the country running.

During World War II, this industrial mobilization system helped the Soviets win, producing tens of thousands of tanks, warplanes and guns the Germans could not match. But since then, mobilization has been the cornerstone of all industrial development, despite profound changes in weapons design.

The tanks and warplanes of the 1940s were primitive and easy to mass-produce. Today the industrial production cycle of a fighter aircraft can be more than three years. In addition, modern weapons production is technically incompatible with civilian industry.

Almost all Western nations have scrapped military-industrial mobilization preparations and plans to raise mass armies. But the "new" doctrine is fully Stalinist in nature: It again states the need to keep and develop the old military-industrial mobilization potential.

The new doctrine stresses the need to be able to raise mass armies to fight "large-scale wars." But it also states that Russia may use nuclear weapons first to defend its sovereignty. This official admission of truth would seem to mean that the country does not need a mass army anymore: The West and China can be effectively deterred by nuclear arms, while insurgents in the South can be better contained by a professional force, not the conscripts and badly trained officers who are slaughtered in Chechnya today.

Still, Russian generals want a big army, and, more importantly, Russian industry is lobbying to maintain mobilization potential, since it allows management to steal all it wants. A company cannot possibly go bankrupt and close down if it is part of a mobilization plan.

The Russian aluminum industry was created to serve in a mobilization, when aluminum consumption would grow tenfold. Russia has virtually no aluminum ore deposits and in peacetime consumes very little aluminum. The ore is imported from Australia and other countries duty free. The aluminum goes to the United States, also duty free. The proceeds, apparently, mostly go to offshore banks, while Russia gets an environmental hazard. It also provides electricity to the aluminum smelter at a discount when the country is short on electric power.

Without the discounts, it would be, of course, impossible to bring ore from Australia to Siberia, export aluminum to the United States and still make honest money.

A mobilization economy cannot possibly compete in a truly open market, and it cannot undergo serious structural change, since no one is allowed to go into liquidation. The new doctrine means that Russia's absurd economy will not change much in the future and that renewed market reform is doomed.

However, Ivanov softened his stance during a meeting with President Bill Clinton later in the day to say that Russia is ready to at least listen to any initiatives that the U.S. administration may propose for a compromise on the 1972 treaty.

The United States would like to modify the ABM treaty to be able to deploy at least 100 interceptors in Alaska and a chain of early warning radars to protect itself from nuclear missile attacks by what it calls "rogue" states, such as North Korea.

Russia's leaders, however, say deployment of such a defense system would undermine the country's ability to cause so-called unacceptable damage to the United States in case of a nuclear war. The principle of mutually unacceptable damage has always been a cornerstone of deterrence between the two nuclear superpowers.

The very fact that Ivanov softened his stance on the ABM treaty after meeting with Clinton indicates the government may eventually concede to modify this accord in such a way that would allow the United States to deploy a limited missile defense, according to Ivan Safranchuk of the Center for Policy Studies and Alexander Pikayev of the Moscow Carnegie Center.

Safranchuk said Russia should make its consent conditional on the signing of a binding document that would bar the United States from expanding this limited shield against ballistic missiles into a national one. He said this would require the U.S. Congress to ratify a number of documents signed by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov in 1997 to define a strategic and non-strategic ballistic-missile defense.

This consent should also be conditional on swift preparation and implementation of a START III treaty, which would reduce the U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals to about 1,500 warheads each, Pikayev said. "In fact, this is our last chance to preserve parity by getting START III in exchange for making concessions on the ABM treaty," the Carnegie center expert said.

Russian and U.S. legislators have ratified the START II treaty, which cuts arsenals to 3,500 warheads each, but Moscow needs further cuts because it cannot afford to keep such a large number of warheads, according to Safranchuk.

Russian generals continue to argue that the country should maintain a qualitative if not quantitative strategic parity with the United States in order to be able to speak as equals with their U.S. counterparts. Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin agreed at a summit in Helsinki in 1997 that a START III treaty would require the two countries' strategic nuclear arsenals to be reduced to between 2,000 and 2,500 warheads. Two years later, Russia proposed that START III should require these arsenals to be cut to between 1,000 and 1,500 warheads. Washington thus far has not agreed to discuss such deep cuts, but has hinted that this could be done if Moscow agrees to modify the ABM treaty.

President Clinton and President Vladimir Putin could sign a memorandum on ABM modifications during their summit in Moscow in June if Washington agrees to deep START III cuts and pledges not to expand its ballistic-missile defense system once it is deployed, Safranchuk said.

Signing such a memorandum would make it difficult for Clinton's successor to walk out of the ABM treaty and expand a limited defense against ballistic missiles. The likely Republican candidate, Governor George W. Bush, advocates deployment of a national anti-missile defense system.

If Russia refuses to make enough modification concessions and no compromise is reached, there is a chance the next U.S. administration may, indeed, walk out of the ABM treaty, according to both Safranchuk and Pikayev.

Putin has already warned that if Washington disregards Moscow and goes ahead with a limited anti-missile system, Russia will walk out of START II, which will allow it to stop downsizing its nuclear arsenals and deploy multiple warheads on its land-based ballistic missiles. Putin also has threatened to abrogate the U.S-Russian agreement that bans medium-range missiles and withdraw from the Conventional Forces in Europe agreement.

Such a mutual abrogation of international treaties would completely destroy U.S.-Russian arms-control efforts, but it would still be an acceptable scenario for Russia and it is, in fact, being advocated by generals despite the diplomats' continued push for a compromise, Safranchuk and Pikayev said. Safranchuk said abrogation of START II would allow Russia to deploy multiple warheads on land-based missiles as well as stop scrapping those Topol ICBMs that roam the country's railways and, thus, are difficult for U.S. satellites to spot. All in all, Russia can afford to keep 3,000 warheads operative provided that most of the land-based ICBMs carry several warheads each, he said.

A recent poll, conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation, an authoritative sociological research organization, found that 56 percent of Russians today view NATO as an aggressive alliance, while only 17 percent see it as a defensive one. Three years ago, the results of a similar survey were 38 and 24 percent respectively. The inescapable conclusion is that Russians are becoming increasingly suspicious of NATO in particular and the West in general.

Several years ago, at the height of a noisy Kremlin campaign against NATO's eastward expansion, I published an article that argued that the expansion of the Western alliance didn't necessarily mean the creation of "new lines of confrontation in the center of Europe." I suggested that this development was a natural and historic process. Nations which had recently liberated themselves from Communism and vouched for liberal democracy would naturally want to join European civilization as well as European political and economic structures.

I believed then, and still believe now, that no amount of shouting or political posturing by Russia would slow or stop this process. Instead, Russia needed to find its own place in this changing world and explore ways to develop full-scale and mutually advantageous cooperation with the West. Back then, these views were shared by many respected people in this country, ranging from Duma members to leading intellectuals. There were clear signs that the general public was slowly moving, step-by-step, towards abandoning their anti-NATO, anti-Western prejudices.

NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia last year destroyed that progress. The dramatic shift in Russian public opinion wasn't caused by some of our politicians supporting Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Nor was it a sign that some approved the use of genocide against Albanians in Kosovo. This has never been characteristic of the Russian people.

The reason is far more disturbing. NATO's actions showed that it has never been, and never will be, a peacekeeping organization. That was the ultimate impression left in Russia by NATO's air raids over Yugoslavia. The bombings made it clear that NATO relies heavily on the use of force, and that to secure its narrow and egoistic interests, the Alliance is ready to ignore international law, United Nations Security Council resolutions and even its own charter.

Too bad. It's clear that force alone cannot really solve any problem. The war over Kosovo only managed to substitute one group of refugees with another. The pain and despair remains -- just look at what's going on there now, a year after KFOR's deployment. There still is no peace. So it seems only natural that NATO's operation against Yugoslavia would fuel suspicion and distrust among Russians. The Yugoslavian example makes many here wonder: Who will be next; could it be Russia or one of its neighbors and close allies?

All this has widened the gap between Russia and the West. This shortsighted NATO policy is part of the reason for the considerable gains conservatives made in both the recent parliamentary and presidential elections. It also helped shape Moscow's determination to resolve the Chechen problem quickly and through the use of force.

A recent decree signed by President-elect Vladimir Putin will see some 191,612 young men sent to serve in the Army and other armed forces by June 31. Military officials say this is necessary because Russia cannot afford to have a professional army at the moment.

"To have an army of volunteers, we would need to double the defense budget," said head of conscription and deputy head of General Headquarters Col. Gen. Vladislav Putilin. "A conscript costs us 17,900 rubles (about $630) a year, while a professional soldier costs 32,000 rubles (about $1,120) a year. A professional army would require the corresponding infrastructure, which would also cost a lot. It’s not realistic now."

Putilin said that the army now has a mixture of conscripts and volunteers. Professional soldiers make up 20 percent of the armed forces but account for 42 percent of troops serving in Chechnya. The generals worry that the armed forces simply won’t have the money to attract enough volunteers to their ranks, while conscription has become more difficult for a number of reasons. The latest conscription campaign will see only 7 percent of those eligible for conscription actually taking up arms. Military officials say it’s not even a case of being able to select from all potential conscripts those most fit for military service. Almost 85 percent are ruled out from the start, 33.4 percent for health grounds and the rest because they have the right to defer their service.

As in previous years, the quality of conscripts will be low, General Headquarters representatives say. Another problem will be ensuring numbers are at the necessary levels, especially in units where particularly high demands are made.

More than half the conscripts sent to the Army today suffer from various kinds of illness that limit their capacity for military service, and with every year, the number of unfit conscripts is increasing.

The head of the Central Military Medical Commission, Maj. Gen. Valery Kulikov, said that over the last three years, the number of conscripts deemed fit for military service has dropped by 4.8 percent. Since 1997, the number of conscripts exempted from service has increased steadily and now surpasses the number of those actually sent to serve.

Draft dodgers pose another problem. Data for the fall of 1999 put the number of draft dodgers at 38,000 ­ 18.6 percent of all those called up over this period. In the same period of 1998, draft dodgers totaled 19,600. General Headquarters explains the increase in draft dodgers by the fact that parents of conscripts are afraid their sons will be sent to Chechnya. Valery Borshchev, chairman of the presidential political consultative council’s human rights chamber, said that if someone does not want to take up arms, they should not be forced to do so. The Russian Constitution gives the right to do alternative military service, but as there is no corresponding legislation, there is a certain question of force when it comes to sending soldiers to Chechnya.

Borshchev said human rights organizations have submitted to the State Duma lower house of parliament a draft law on alternative military service that would take into account individual rights and the Constitution. Putilin said the Defense Ministry has also submitted its own draft law on the subject to the Duma.

Putilin expressed concern that the issue has still not been examined and that no one knows when it will be discussed. In the meantime, he said, conscription problems continue.

"There are plenty of ways to get out of military service," said Timur Syrtlanov, a first-year student at the Defense Ministry military university. Syrtlanov said that wealthier parents get sons into prestigious universities, which defer their service. Others study at their university military departments and do their service as officers, getting a better deal than rank-and-file soldiers. Others study for two or three years in a military academy, which is counted as military service, and then transfer to a civilian university.

"As for me, I want to become an officer, like my father," Syrtlanov said, "though there’s not so many of us who think that way. There are people here just to get their military service out of the way."

Draft dodgers look to be in for tougher times. In the Moscow region last year, 3,946 people were registered as draft dodgers. Officials investigated 92 of the cases, but only seven people ended up behind bars.

"We’re not happy with this situation," said the head of the Moscow region military enlistment office, Col. Magomed Ismailov. He said the security ministries had drawn up instructions on helping the enlistment offices to prevent draft dodging. The Defense Ministry and Interior Ministry have already approved the document. So draft dodgers will have not only the enlistment offices, but also the police to deal with.

The ABM treaty has been the cornerstone of U.S. disarmament policy for nearly three decades. It was a major arms-control achievement, one that limited ballistic missile defense to a strategically insignificant deployment. The treaty ended not only the possibility of a costly missile-defense system, but also the need for a continuing race in strategic offensive arms. The treaty helped reduce tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and provided a basis for political detente. In recent years, most past U.S. secretaries of defense, including Robert McNamara, James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, have called on the United States and the Soviet Union to “avoid actions that would undermine the ABM Treaty.” Former Secretary of State George Shultz reportedly threatened to resign when President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars initiative put the ABM treaty at risk.

The Clinton administration formally renounced the Reagan administration’s efforts to “reinterpret” the ABM treaty and, until recently, supported the treaty itself.

The CIA gets involved

Ironically, the president has stated that in June -- the same month he will travel to Moscow -- he will decide whether to authorize deployment of a national missile defense. Clinton’s trip to Moscow will mark his first visit with President Vladimir Putin and will celebrate Russia’s ratification of the START II Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Many fear that the president will go ahead with a limited NMD program in order to protect Vice President Gore from criticism in this year’s election. (Clinton decided on NATO expansion in 1995 in order to protect himself from similar criticism in the presidential campaign of 1996.) The Clinton administration’s support for a limited system is based on a declassified CIA intelligence estimate (“Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States”), which reflected weaker standards for judging missile threats and the worst-case approach of more recent CIA analyses.

Without developing any new data, CIA analysts have begun asserting that Iran and North Korea are moving closer to a nuclear capability that would threaten the United States. Last year, the Senate defeated ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in part because agency officials doubted they could verify compliance. The sudden incapacity of the CIA to monitor a disarmament treaty and the sudden belief that Third World missile programs are more immediate threats to the United States smacks of the politicization of intelligence or a lack of commitment to arms control. It revives the suspicion that, once again, a CIA director has put the nation’s strategic intelligence at the service of a political agenda.

Another arms race?

It is a particularly sad irony that the United States is putting its strategic relationship with Russia at risk for a system that cannot work. A team of 11 physicists and engineers, whose work was sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Union of Concerned Scientists found that such systems can be rendered useless by simple decoys or other countermeasures easily within the grasp of any country that could launch a nuclear warhead at the United States. Nations sophisticated enough to build a ballistic missile that could threaten the United States could also develop the balloon decoys or aluminum shields that would deceive a defensive interceptor.

The panel concluded that shiny Mylar balloons, similar to the kind sold in grocery stores, could achieve these results. The Pentagon, moreover, has delayed the next NMD test scheduled for June because of dissatisfaction with the program to date. Unfortunately, the United States already has spent more than $50 billion on various types of missile defense; President Clinton’s program would cost another $30 billion.

We clearly are at a critical strategic juncture. If the United States refrains from developing a NMD, it is quite possible that Washington and Moscow can agree on greater limits on their strategic offensive systems. Then the two sides could resume the strategic dialogue that was broken when NATO added three new Eastern European nations to the alliance and deployed forces in a war in the Balkans, outside the jurisdiction of the defensive alliance. Conversely, if the United States goes ahead with a national system, we will see the collapse of the arms-control regime and the beginning of another arms race that will include the United States, Russia and China as well as France and Britain.