New York Times - 05.13.2002

The New York Times Bush Announces a Nuclear Pact With Russia to Reduce Warheads By MICHAEL WINES MOSCOW - The United States and Russia have reached agreement to slash each nation's nuclear weapons stockpiles by roughly two thirds, and will sign a binding treaty in Moscow on May 24, President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin said today. Mr. Bush made the surprise announcement on national television as he left the White House for a trip to Chicago. "This is good news for the American people,'' Mr. Bush said. "It will make the world more peaceful, and put behind us the cold war for once and for all.'' In Moscow, Mr. Putin said an agreement would have been difficult to reach without Mr. Bush's personal attention to the issue, and that "we are pleased with the joint efforts'' of American and Russian negotiators. Precise details of the new accord were not immediately available, but it generally calls for both sides to reduce their arsenals of nuclear warheads from the current levels of about 6,000 to between 1,700 and 2,200. The United States had insisted on keeping scrapped warheads and their launchers in an emergency reserve instead of destroying them, saying the future was too unpredictable to make such large reductions irreversible. A White House spokesman said the final treaty would allow the United States to warehouse some but not all of those warheads. For its part, Russia appeared to have scored a negotiating victory by persuading the White House to accept a treaty, which requires approval by two-thirds of the Senate, rather than a lesser agreement that would have been easier to abandon. The Bush administration had initially said it wanted as few binding limits as possible on American actions, and in fact would have preferred a simple handshake agreement. The treaty signing will climax a long-planned summit meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin to be held in St. Petersburg and Moscow beginning May 23. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov of Russia will meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, on Tuesday to place the final flourishes on the treaty and on other summit meeting documents, including a declaration of a new strategic framework for relations between the two states. At the Iceland meeting, NATO nations' foreign ministers will take another step toward bringing Russian closer to the family of Western democracies by giving Moscow a policy-setting role equal to that of NATO's 19 member nations in some areas, such as counter-terrorism policy and peacekeeping efforts. Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin will make that new role official, along with other NATO heads of state, in a ceremony to be held near Rome after their Moscow summit. On Sunday, just hours before today's announcement, Mr. Ivanov and Mr. Powell had indicated in an unusual joint interview on Russian television that their nations had an agreement in principle to cuts their warhead stocks, but that some important details remained to be ironed out. "We are continuing and will continue the negotiations,'' Mr. Ivanov said, in lukewarm fashion, in the interview on the state-controlled television network ORT. "But at a certain stage we must register the understandings we have reached.'' The men appeared on a program in which an interviewer questioned three panelists, among them Mr. Ivanov. Through the satellite hookup, an inset of Secretary Powell was shown on the screen so that questions could be addressed to both men, and Secretary Powell's answers were translated as he spoke. Speaking for roughly a half-hour, the two men said their governments were in general agreement that they had entered a new era of cooperation, spurred by the realization after the attacks in the United States last September that international terrorism was a global threat that no nation could address alone. In that vein, Secretary Powell offered condolences to Mr. Ivanov for the bombing of a military parade in southwest Russia last Thursday, in which at least 41 people died, including 17 children. Mr. Ivanov also rejected assertions by American officials, reported in The New York Times on Sunday, that Russia might be secretly preparing to resume nuclear testing on the island of Novaya Zemlya, in the Arctic Sea off Russia's north coast. The article said that officials of the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, a panel that compiles the views of many federal agencies on nuclear issues, had told members of Congress that Russian work at Novaya Zemlya appeared consistent with past preparations there for nuclear tests. Mr. Ivanov called the statements unfortunate and "without any grounds,'' and said Russian officials planned to ask the United States to explain the charge, given both nations' agreement that they were forming "a strategic partnership.'' He suggested that the American warnings had been fomented by officials who had yet to adjust to the new realities of Russian-American diplomacy. "Life's relationship cannot be changed overnight by an order of a certain person who says the cold war is over,'' Mr. Ivanov said. "There are still people who have their old ideas.''