By LOU MARANO
WASHINGTON, March 14 (UPI) -- A prominent Russian nuclear weapons expert has said he believes his country's national security will not be jeopardized if it reduced its number of nuclear warheads to between 1,000 and 1,500.
Retired Maj. Gen. Vladimir Belous told the Itar-Tass news agency Monday that the nuclear arsenals of both Russia and the United States are excessive. However, such a change brings its own risks, a State Department analyst warned.
Russian leaders have alluded to the 1,500 figure before, but this the first time a lower number has been put on the record. Belous does not speak for the government, but he is a professor at the government's Academy of Military Sciences. Itar-Tass, although not a government agency, is the closest thing Russia has to an official news service. These facts have raised speculation that Belous has unofficially floated a "trial balloon" for the Kremlin.
"The intent could be to affect the START II negotiations and the framework discussions for START III," Graham Allison said in a phone interview Tuesday. Allison is a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and director of the school's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Belous told Itar-Tass that such a reduction will bring Russia "to the START-III stipulated level."
At the March, 1997 summit in Helsinki, Finland, U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin agreed that once START II enters into force, negotiations will begin on a START III that would establish, by the end of 2007, a maximum of 2,000 to 2,500 strategic warheads. Washington has been unwilling to consider lower figures.
Last year Belous wrote that Russia's Duma has dragged out the START II ratification process because of unfriendly steps by the United States that both politicians and the public perceive as taking advantage of Russia's temporary weakness. These include NATO enlargement and "NATO aggression in Yugoslavia," he wrote in the journal Nuclear Security and Safety.
A State Department analyst told United Press International that Russia has an economic incentive to reduce its number of warheads. The general noted that the cost of maintaining Russia's strategic nuclear forces accounted for almost 20 percent of the defense budget. "Such expenditures are much too heavyfrom the military point of view," he said.
Belous said that even the 400 to 500 megaton-class warheads that would destroy about 30 percent of an enemy's population and 70 percent of its industrial potential would be excessive.
But the State Department official cautioned that reductions on this scale would assume a Russian strategic doctrine very different from the one the United States has followed since the 1960s. This "counter-military" approach calls for a number of smaller nuclear weapons aimed at specific targets. The analyst explained that drastic reductions in Russia's nuclear arsenal and a reliance on 400 or fewer megaton-class warheads indicates further movement toward a "counter-value" strategy aimed at the annihilation of people and the destruction of industrial capacity.
"Since 1989, the Russians have been moving toward a counter-value strategy as the number and accuracy of their missiles declines," he said. "A counter-value approach is less expensive," he said, "because the missiles don't have to have the kind of accuracy that a counter-military strategy requires."
Allison agreed that Belous' remarks could indicate a movement in the direction of a counter-value strategy. "A large part of Russia's strategic arsenal is nearing retirement age," he said, and missiles are being replaced at a slow rate.
In 1998, Belous wrote that the weakness of Russian conventional forces and "a major change of balance of interests in Europe" caused the Kremlin to raise significantly the role of tactical (short-range) nuclear weapons. He wrote that this should entail the creation of "groupings" of tactical weapons under the control of local commanders, at least in time of crisis. This long has been considered a dangerous scenario that presents a far lower "nuclear threshold" than strategic weapons controlled at the highest levels.
Belous acknowledged, however, that while U.S. doctrine foresees certain cases in which nuclear weapons may be used, no threats exist that conventional U.S. forces cannot deal with, and the Pentagon does not seriously rely on nuclear weapons.
