By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page A37

At the confirmation hearings for Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John R. Bolton, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) had these words of advice about the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty:

"John, I want you to take that ABM Treaty and dump it in the same place we dumped our ABM Treaty co-signer, the Soviet Union, and that is to say, on the ash heap of history," Helms said with a chuckle.

Less than nine months later, the ABM Treaty is, indeed, destined for the ash heap of history. On Thursday, President Bush formally announced that the United States would withdraw from the landmark agreement to allow ambitious testing of missile defenses.

Yet, many arms control experts say the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, or mutually assured destruction, that the treaty enshrined remains alive and well. It has even been a centerpiece of the Bush administration's efforts to win Russian acceptance of missile defense tests; officials in Washington have repeatedly assured their counterparts in Moscow that U.S. missile defenses will not be able to block a full-scale Russian nuclear strike.

The United States has about 5,950 strategic nuclear warheads capable of striking Russia, and Russia has about 5,800 strategic nuclear warheads capable of hitting the United States. Because military planners on each side fear the other might strike, some of those weapons are always on alert, capable of being fired within minutes -- and that does not appear likely to change anytime soon.

Even though both countries have promised to reduce their arsenals and Bush spoke last week about replacing mutually assured destruction with "mutual cooperation," the militaries on both sides remain under orders to maintain the threat of annihilation.

"Our force is configured to hold Russian nuclear and economic targets at risk," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nuclear nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Even while we're talking to President [Vladimir] Putin, we're targeting his office. It's a fact of life."

The nuclear balance of terror has been remarkably stable. Even at the height of the Cold War, Russia and America tried to avoid coming to direct blows. Now, as some American critics of the Bush administration's missile defense plan argue that it won't work, some Russian critics of the plan worry that it might.

Russian military planners fear that fewer than 100 of Moscow's warheads would be able to survive an American first strike and that a leap forward in missile defense technology might enable the United States to defend itself against that rump nuclear force, according to Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank.

"So they look to the future and the day when the U.S. might deploy a couple of hundred interceptors or so, and they do worry that their weakened nuclear force would be neutralized by even a thin U.S. system," Blair said.

Moreover, Russia's array of satellites and radars designed to warn of a nuclear attack is aging and losing reliability.

"This probably adds to the almost daily instability," said John Rhinelander, a lawyer who helped negotiate the ABM Treaty under President Richard M. Nixon. "The Russian early warning system is full of holes, and Russia will keep large numbers of ICBMs on hair-trigger alert. And I don't see how we'll improve that situation if we keep throwing sand in their face."

Some arms experts also argue that pulling out of the ABM Treaty could encourage Russian hard-liners who want to renounce parts of the START II agreement. Under that pact, Russia is supposed to eliminate 100 SS-18 missiles, with 10 warheads each, and to reduce the number of warheads on each of its 100 SS-19 missiles from six to one by 2007. Some Russian officials have suggested they might keep the multiple warheads to improve the chances of overwhelming any U.S. defenses.

Putin might have been better off if he had reached a deal with the Clinton administration, something senior Clinton administration officials tried to impress upon him. But the Russian president, believing either that he had a better chance of a deal with Bush or that Bush would kill any deal made with Clinton, held out.

"What did the United States have to do to the ABM Treaty to make sure that we were dealing with new [missile] threats? The answer is: There's a whole lot you can do without breaching the ABM Treaty," said Strobe Talbott, who tried to negotiate modifications in the ABM Treaty while serving as Clinton's deputy secretary of state. "The other question is: Do you think that bilateral negotiated agreements between the United States and Russia with the force of law are still useful or not? The Clinton administration felt they were very useful."

The Bush administration places higher priority on developing a layered missile defense system. Even Colin L. Powell, regarded as the Bush official most reluctant to withdraw unilaterally from the treaty, stood behind Bush in May 2000 when the then-presidential candidate said he would pull out of the ABM Treaty if Russia did not allow missile defense tests.

More generally, the Bush administration tends to view global treaties with suspicion. Perhaps nothing indicated that better than the choice of Bolton to lead negotiations on arms control.

Bolton summarized his philosophy in an article last fall in the University of Chicago Journal of International Law that divided the policy world into "Americanists" and "globalists." He said globalists -- "each tightly clutching a favorite new treaty or multilateralist proposal" -- want to bind the United States in a web of agreements on everything from arms to the environment to human rights, while Americanists seek to preserve U.S. sovereignty and policy flexibility.

"Every time America is forced to bend its knee to international pressure," wrote Bolton, who has traveled to Moscow eight times this year for ABM talks, "it sets a significant, and detrimental, precedent for all of the others."

Far better, he has argued in congressional testimony and speeches, would be an approach that relies on informal agreements, glorified handshakes between leaders like Bush and Putin. He has said that arms control accords became floors, rather than ceilings, on numbers of nuclear weapons.

Yet the Bush administration has bowed to the need for some written agreements. Although the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said new targets for levels of strategic nuclear weapons would be set informally, Powell is now negotiating a formal, written agreement with verification measures.