After U.S. Scraps ABM Treaty, Russia Rejects Curbs of Start II
One day after the United States formally abandoned the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, Russia responded in curt kind today, saying it was no longer bound by the 1993 accord known as Start II that outlawed multiple-warhead missiles and other especially destabilizing weapons in the two nations' strategic arsenals.

"There's no point in talking about this treaty anymore, just as there is no point in talking about the ABM treaty," Vladimir Z. Dvorkin, a retired major general who heads the Russian center for Problems of Strategic Nuclear Forces, said in an interview tonight. "It's all in oblivion. It's time to start thinking of something else."

Others noted that the new nuclear-arms accord that Presidents Bush and Vladimir V. Putin signed in May already would reduce each side's stocks to between 1,750 and 2,200 warheads, well below the Start II levels. In that respect, Start II was an outmoded treaty even before Moscow buried it today.

Few doubted that today's announcement was in large part a bow to Russian politicians who have ached for a stronger response to the United States' go-it-alone policies on arms control.

The treaty, agreed upon by Presidents Clinton and Boris N. Yeltsin in 1993, proposed to slash United States and Russian strategic nuclear stockpiles over 10 years by nearly half, to no more than 3,500 warheads on each side. More important, it would have eliminated land-based multiple-warhead missiles, or MIRV's, and so-called "heavy" intercontinental missiles. Arms-control scholars call those weapons the most dangerous and destabilizing in the two nations' arsenals.

Roiled by conservative arguments that Start II endangered American security, Congress did not ratify the treaty until 1996, and refused a protocol that would have deferred it. Russia's Parliament approved the treaty and the new deadline in 2000, but only on the condition that the United States did not abandon the antiballistic missile accord.

One result is that Russia has yet to remove multiple warheads from some of its missiles, including ones whose service lives will now be extended. In the interim, Russia has developed a new missile, the Topol-M, which its military experts say is decades ahead of any American design and can penetrate any missile defense the United States can erect.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/15/international/europe/15RUSS.html