May 26, 2002	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 13,1423

MOSCOW: Thirty years ago almost to the day, a US Republican president came to Moscow to sign an arms control treaty which laid the basis of the world’s security architecture for a generation.On Friday, another Republican president signed another arms control treaty, which concludes the cold war age and is probably the last such pact.

“It took six months of negotiations,” said a senior Russian official. “The talks were complex; there was lots of conflict.” When Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT-1) on May 22 1972, pledging to set upper limits on the two superpowers’ ballooning nuclear arsenals, Washington and Mos-cow established the “Pax Atom-ica” that has reigned ever since.

Friday’s signing ceremony in the Kremlin for the strategic offensive reductions treaty (SORT) marks the end of that period, based on the balance of terror, freeing the US to embark within a couple of weeks on its cherished dream of barricading the country behind a national missile shield that is supposed to make it invulnerable to the “assured destruction” of past decades.

The SALT and SORT treaties bracket a 30-year period of arms control during which both Washington and Moscow recognised their nuclear stalemate. Through what became known as detente, they sought to avoid reruns of events such as the Cuban missile crisis and the risk of accidental nuclear war or surprise attacks.

The 1972 pact entailed a tacit US admission that it had forfeited its nuclear superiority. Yesterday’s pact implicitly dumps that parity and reasserts American superiority.

In various ways, the new treaty may herald a more dangerous and less stable period. Although it commits both sides to binning some 8,000 of their joint total of 12,000 long-range missiles, most of the warheads being cut will be stored and held in reserve — at the US’s insistence — raising acute fears for the security of stored warheads in Russia.

According to a senior Russian official, the US even wanted a clause in the new treaty allowing it to increase its stockpile above the agreed ceiling of 2,200 as long as the Kremlin was notified. The Russians talked America out of that; instead, either side must give three months’ notice before abrogating the treaty.

There is no schedule for dismantling the warheads. The treaty runs until 2012, so in theory either side could maintain its arsenal until October that year and then withdraw from the treaty by the year’s end.

Mikhail Lysenko, head of the Russian foreign ministry’s disarmament department, said there would be plenty more arms negotiations. “I’m convinced we’ll continue to work with the US till [the treaty] expires and there will be agreements on transparency and implementation.” But the US did not want this agreement in binding treaty form and most experts believe it is the last of its kind.

The way-stations of the age of arms control are 1972, 1978 — when the second SALT treaty was signed, setting ceilings on nuclear missile launchers — and 1991, with the START-1 treaty that cut each side’s arsenal to its current level of 6,000 warheads.

The 1991 deal ran to 700 pages. The new agreement fits on three sheets of paper.

In 1993, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin agreed on START-2, halving their arsenals again, but that pact ran into ratification hurdles and has not been implemented.

In three weeks’ time, when the Americans are free of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty and able to start previously banned work on their missile shield, the Kremlin is expected to announce formally that it no longer feels constrained by the START-2 treaty.

If the past 30 years were dominated by the need to limit and cut offensive missiles, the future is being geared to defence against them.—Dawn/The Guar-dian News Service