It took just five months for the United States and Russia to agree to the biggest nuclear arms reduction in history, but it will be the turn of the century, or later, before those nuclear flames are fully extinguished.
President Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin on Wednesday signed an agreement to reduce their strategic nuclear arsenals from a combined 21,000 warheads at present to 6,500.But effecting such an arms cut is a task far more complex than just pulling a plug. Under the agreement, the warheads and the missiles they sit atop do not have to be destroyed. They are rendered unusable simply by destroying the protective underground silos from which they are launched.
"You're not simply throwing away bows and arrows," said a senior administration official who discussed the accord on grounds he not be identified. "To give you an idea, you're destroying a silo that you built to survive a nuclear attack."
The new arms agreement builds on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which was signed by the United States and Soviet Union in 1991 but has not been ratified. The latest accord goes beyond START by requiring elimination of all land-based missiles with multiple warheads.
The practical effect for the United States is that all 50 of the 10-warhead Peacekeeper missiles based in Wyoming will be taken out of operation and their silos destroyed.
Also, the 450 Minuteman II missiles in South Dakota, Missouri and Montana will be eliminated.
That means a total of 500 missile silos will have to be destroyed.
The official couldn't provide an estimate of the cost of destroying the silos and storing the missiles and warheads, but he said there would be long-term savings from operating fewer missiles.
The Russians must destroy the silos for all 308 of their fearsome SS-18s multiple-warhead missiles and either retire their smaller SS-24s and two older types of multiple-warhead missiles or arm them with only one warhead apiece.
Some of the SS-24s are based on railroad cars, but it was not clear whether the treaty that will be needed to implement the agreement signed Wednesday will require destruction of the rail cars.
The START accord called for cuts in the Air Force's Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missiles, and Bush announced in September he would begin removing the missiles from their silos even before START was ratified.
The Air Force has been taking Minuteman IIs out of silos in South Dakota and Montana since October, but no silos have been destroyed yet, according to Air Force spokesman Lt. Bill Harrison.
So far, 58 of the 450 Minuteman IIs have been withdrawn, the spokesman said, and the job is continuing at a rate of about one missile per week. The last of these missiles is scheduled to be deactivated by March 1997.
The nation's three-warhead Minuteman III missiles are being converted to single-warhead weapons.
Destroying the missile silos is actually fairly simple, although it has to be done strictly according to the treaties, which set a target date of 2003 for completion.
The upper part of the 90-foot-deep silos, which are reinforced with concrete to withstand the shock of a near-miss thermonuclear attack, will be blown up with explosives. The debris will then be dumped into the lower parts of silo. After a 90-day period during which Russian satellites are to confirm the silos' destruction, a concrete cap is to be poured over the opening.
The warheads probably will be stored at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., and possibly at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., according to Robert S. Norris, a nuclear weapons expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private research group.
Harrison said the Peacekeeper and Minuteman II missiles that are taken out of operation will be stored initially at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, and eventually used to launch satellites and to test new Air Force guidance systems.
Also as part of the arms agreements, hundreds of strategic ballistic missiles will have to be withdrawn from launch tubes aboard U.S. Poseidon and Trident submarines. And hundreds of air-delivered nuclear missiles and bombs will be eliminated.