The newest U.S.-Soviet arms treaty is the first to reduce the most deadly nuclear arms, yet it still leaves each side with enough thermonuclear firepower to wipe out the other many times over.
And while the Bush administration is looking at how many strategic nuclear weapons it really needs now that the Cold War is over, it seems lukewarm to the idea of radically cutting back.In fact, it's spending billions of dollars to build new nuclear arms.
Nine years after Moscow and Washington began negotiating cuts in their arsenals of strategic, or long-range, nuclear weapons, the two sides have agreed to a complex formula that will reduce those warheads by about 30 percent.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is to be signed at a July 30-31 summit in Moscow.
It leaves the superpowers a long way from Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's stated goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons by the end of the century, and analysts say it's unclear whether there will even be a START II negotiation.
Talking to reporters Wednesday in London, President Bush appeared to indicate his dim view of reductions beyond the limits set by the new treaty.
Asked if he would consider additional cuts, Bush replied dryly, "I haven't started thinking that way."
Raymond Garthoff, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. arms negotiator, said any push for further progress is likely to come from the Soviets, who are eager to reduce the U.S. advantage in naval nuclear arms.
"It's clear that they're ready to go further than we are" in additional reductions in strategic nuclear arms, Garthoff said.
Garthoff said it would "make good sense" to cut U.S. and Soviet strategic nuclear arsenals by another 50 percent beyond the levels set by START. The treaty leaves about 9,000 warheads on the U.S. side and about 7,000 for the Soviets - more than the two countries had when the START negotiations began in 1982. Both sides also have thousands of nuclear warheads not covered by the treaty.
Although START leaves the United States with a numerical edge in warheads, the fine print of the agreement gives the Soviets some important advantages, such as numbers of ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. Taken together, the treaty's many provisions leave the two sides roughly equal.
An area of nuclear disarmament that may get U.S. and Soviet attention in the
next few years is weapons of the shortest range, those that travel less than 300 miles and are deployed mainly in Europe and the western Soviet Union.
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney told a congressional hearing on Tuesday that he saw a good chance that NATO would agree this fall to open negotiations on short-range nuclear forces, an area in which the Soviets hold a large numerical advantage.
"Short-range systems and nuclear artillery don't have much meaning" in Europe now that Germany is reunited, the former Warsaw Pact alliance is gone and Soviet troops are leaving Eastern Europe, Cheney told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.