Fresh START.

PRESIDENTS BUSH and Yeltsin signed a farreaching Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) on January 3 in Moscow. The U.S. and Russia are to reduce nuclear warheads to between 3,000 and 3,500 on each side; both are to phase out the destabilizing land-based ICBMs carrying multiple warheads; the Russians are to eliminate, in particular, the SS-18 heavy ICBMs that posed such a threat in the 1980s.

NR has never succumbed to the illusion that the arms race was a cause of conflict. The strategic nuclear race, like all other arms races, was a symptom rather than a cause of political tension (as Patrick Glynn has amply demonstrated in his Closing Pandora's Box). It is no accident that the collapse of Soviet Communism suddenly made arms reduction easy--and to some degree irrelevant.

This is not to disparage the Bush-Yeltsin treaty. Despite some last-minute U.S. compromises, it is an important achievement. The uncertainties of the Russian political future make it essential to lock in the arms reductions that a benign Russian leadership is currently prepared to make. Even with a political turn for the worse in Moscow, these agreements would give us some purchase on the future.

The more interesting drama here has to do with Ukraine. Like Kazakhstan and Belarus, it has Soviet ICBMs on its soil and must sign onto START II if its provisions are to be carried out. Unlike Kazakhstan and Belarus, however, Ukraine has been playing hard to get insisting on Western security guarantees against Russian domination if it should part with the excellent bargaining chip that the missiles constitute. (It has some 130 silo-based SS-19s and 46 mobile SS-24s.) The Bush Administration, in a high Wilsonian dudgeon over the Ukrainians' stubbornness, evaded the issue for a year. To no avail. Ukrainians have been taught by centuries of history that their national survival is at stake.

Finally, on January 8, President Bush gave a visiting Ukrainian diplomat a set of assurances that we would seek immediate UN Security Council action if a non-nuclear Ukraine were threatened by any nuclear power. The State Department added in writing that "Ukraine's security as a non-nuclear state, integrated within European security structures, is an important matter for the United States." The assurances sound much too feeble, but they are a step toward American recognition of a reality--namely that Russian aggression against Ukraine would signify a resurgence of Russian power that would pose a wider threat to Europe and a renewed problem for the United States. This is simply true whether our diplomats understand it or not.