The Washington Post
MOSCOW — A dispute over what to do with decommissioned nuclear warheads threatens to complicate efforts by the United States and Russia to sharply reduce their Cold War arsenals, as leaders here accused Washington of breaking faith with arms control commitments made in November.
The Pentagon announced this week that the United States would keep and store some of the warheads it takes off line rather than destroy them. The Russian government and its political allies complained that such a move would undercut the value of mutual arms cuts since the United States could simply reactivate nuclear weapons on short notice.
"Of course, we stand for interpreting the reduction of nuclear armaments as their disarmament," Dmitri Rogozin, chairman of the international affairs committee of the lower house of the Russian parliament, said Friday. The panel’s deputy chairman, Konstantin Kosachyov, said the U.S. intention to store warheads amounted to a "desire to hide an ax in the bosom."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not addressed the Pentagon announcement, but his Foreign Ministry issued a terse statement insisting that any cuts be "irreversible so that strategic offensive weapons can be cut not only ‘on paper.’ "
The disagreement, a longstanding feature of arms talks between the two nuclear powers, re-emerged two months after Putin and President Bush exchanged promises at a Washington summit to enact deep reductions in strategic nuclear warheads. Bush pledged to cut the U.S. arsenal from about 6,000 to between 1,700 and 2,200. Putin responded with a vow to cut two-thirds, essentially committing to his previous proposal to go down to 1,500 warheads.
Putin has pushed Bush to put their pledges into writing, preferably in the form of a treaty that can be verified. Bush has resisted, saying it was enough to shake hands on the issue, but has agreed to talk about crafting a joint statement of some kind.
Under the complicated counting procedures enshrined in past arms control treaties, both sides have maintained some of their deactivated warheads in reserve without violating negotiated ceilings. However, the United States has kept far more and has a greater financial capacity for continuing to do so.
Even as Bush and Putin were trading their plans in November, Russian officials cautioned that they did not believe the U.S. military would live up to the goal of disarmament because stored warheads could be placed back in active service. The announcement by Assistant Defense Secretary J.D. Crouch this week seemed to confirm those concerns, although he did not specify how many warheads would be stored instead of destroyed.
Some analysts cautioned against reading too much into the renewed disagreement. "I cannot find any military value for keeping these warheads," said Alexander Savelyev, head of the strategic studies department at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow.
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