On the Right - Squeeze Play.(relations between Washington and Moscow)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, MAY 29

The mating dance between Washington and Moscow almost takes us back to the Cold War years-which continue to be informative.

In 1972, there was the ABM Treaty, which is being hallowed as the Constitutional Convention of the missile age. Its postulates are that the signatories, the United States and Russia, should not take measures to defend themselves against missiles headed at each other. That way, the architects reasoned, any temptation to first-strike offense would be mitigated by the knowledge that retaliation was possible. If we couldn't defend ourselves against Russian missiles, we wouldn't undertake to deliver our own.

What has happened, of course, is that there is no longer a balance of terror between the two great superpowers. That, and an albescent technology which holds out the hope, not that a flotilla of missiles could be estopped in mid-air, but that a few missiles could be intercepted. That is the reasoning behind the proposal by the Bush administration, carrying on a vision of Ronald Reagan's, to build an antimissile system, an enterprise very much in the works now, though at the planning stage.

Russia opposes this emphatically. So emphatically that people have begun to forget to ask the basic question: Why should this be so? What have the Russians to lose from any success by the United States in achieving some kind of protection from nuclear missiles?

The answer to this is that the only thing the Russians would stand to lose is a projected world scene in which everybody had an antimissile system, resulting in a loss of the military edge Russia now has against potentially fractious nations. Reality tells us that it is inconceivable that Moscow would emerge, in an age of antimissile technology, fearing that Iran or Iraq or India or Japan would proceed aggressively against Russia with a sense of immunity to Russia's huge arsenal of nuclear weapons.

So what is it that Russia genuinely fears? It is the loss of the grand status Russia has enjoyed (and profited from) in the ...