Stepping Back from the Nuclear Cliff.

• Author: MAKHIJANI, ARJUN
• Position: Preventing nuclear warfare by de-alerting weapons

Contrary to widespread public opinion, the danger of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia has not receded.

During the NATO-Yugoslavia war, the tension between the two powers rose to some of the highest levels since the Cuban missile crisis. "I told NATO, the Americans, the Germans: `Don't push us toward military action. Otherwise, there will be a European war for sure and possibly world war,'" said Russian President Boris Yeltsin on April 6.

"You have to understand that if we want to cause you a problem over this, we could," said Vladimir Lukin, chairman of the Russian State Duma Foreign Policy Committee. "Someone, we don't know who, could send up a missile from a ship or a submarine and detonate a nuclear weapon high over the United States. The EMP [electromagnetic pulse that destroys electronic and computer equipment] would take away all your capability."

"If NATO goes from air force to ground force, it will be a world catastrophe," said Anatoly Chubais, the former First Deputy Russian Prime Minister.

Former President Mikhail Gorbachev, the individual who did more than anyone else to end the Cold War, said that U.S. ambitions to exercise global hegemony were risking "even, perhaps, a hot war."

"If the question is to be or not to be for Russia, we must use everything we have in the armed forces, including nuclear weapons," said Anatoly Kvashin, chief of the Russian General Staff, in response to the bombing.

Yeltsin, erratic and in failing health, also threatened world war over the bombing of Iraq last December.

Such comments should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric or hot-headed talk.

Russia is going through a volatile period, and its instability makes the United States and the rest of the world less secure. The country is in grievous economic distress, has no practical recourse to conventional military capability, and has a deteriorating nuclear weapons command-and-control infrastructure. Russia has little money to maintain its equipment, to train its forces, or to replace broken and defective machinery. It cannot even pay its armed forces personnel regularly. Mistreatment of ordinary soldiers is so rife that people are afraid to send their sons into the military. The suicide rate among recruits is high.

In response to this military weakness, Yeltsin in April approved "a blueprint for the development and use of nonstrategic nuclear weapons," which would modernize some of the tactical and short-range weapons Russia removed from its arsenal several years ago. This is a major step backwards.

We are witnessing severe setbacks for arms control and disarmament. The gains of the hopeful first years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when U.S. and Russian leaders could act in concert, are being rapidly eroded.

There is little prospect that START II, the treaty that would reduce Russia's nuclear arsenal from 6,000 to about 3,000 warheads, will be ratified by Russia in the absence of new actions by the United States. While negotiations between the United States and Russia are set to resume in the aftermath of the NATO-Yugoslavia war, the Russian reliance on nuclear weapons is unlikely to change without a move on the part of the United States that is more sensitive to Russian security concerns. Even Gorbachev's removal of battlefield nuclear weapons from Russia's arsenal may be reversed. In the Russian military, there is a widespread feeling that in the event of a conflict with NATO, the country has no usable military muscle other than nuclear weapons.

In its new strategic doctrine announced at the April summit, NATO, in turn, did not rule out deploying tactical nuclear weapons of its own. "Sub-strategic nuclear weapons will, however, not be deployed in normal circumstances on surface vessels and attack submarines," it said. Evidently, NATO retains the option to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons in abnormal circumstances.

But nuclear war between Washington and Moscow may be more likely to arise not from a command decision but from accidents, miscommunications, or computer foul-ups during times of tension.

Only four years ago, a...