The Nation has warned repeatedly that the Bush Administration was threatening to undermine perhaps the best chance in a generation for a cooperative relationship with Russia that would make the world safer. The US-Russian nuclear weapons reduction agreement, announced May 13 and scheduled to be signed when George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in Moscow on May 24, confirms our worst fears--and indeed may even create new dangers.

An unprecedented kind of cooperation between the two former cold war rivals is essential because of the disintegration of Russia's Soviet-era nuclear infrastructures, a development that has made the dangers of nuclear proliferation and accidents even greater than they were during the cold war. The only solution is very deep, rapid and irreversible cuts in the number of nuclear weapons in both countries, along with taking those that remain off hairtrigger alert. This treaty, which was virtually dictated to an impoverished and militarily weak Russia by the Bush Administration, falls far short of that goal--it doesn't even mention de-alerting--and thus represents a potentially tragic lost opportunity.

The treaty calls for each side to reduce its strategic warheads from about 6,000 to between 2,200 and 1,700. On the surface, those cuts may seem to be "historic," as the White House is claiming. Leaving aside the fact that the lower numbers are still obscenely high, the reductions are not to be realized until 2012, and during that ten-year period neither side is obliged to make cuts on a specified schedule. Since the agreement also permits either side to withdraw from the treaty with three months' notice, the United States or Russia could legally carry out few or no reductions for almost a decade and then abrogate the treaty before it expires. (The withdrawal clause was also insisted upon by the habitually unilateralist Bush Administration; because the treaty was all but imposed on Putin, it's unlikely to have much strong or lasting support in Moscow in any case.) Worse, reductions made may turn out to be virtual because neither side, on White House insistence, is required to destroy its decommissioned warheads--it may store as many as it wishes, as Washington has made clear it intends to do. Moscow will almost certainly do the same, and, given the widely recognized lack of security at its storage facilities, will thus multiply the already considerable risk of Russia's nuclear devices falling into the wrong hands--that is, fueling the danger of proliferation that has been especially alarming since September 11.

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