Clinton's Nuclear Diplomacy

Call it red-button relations. After all that speechmaking on the need for economic reform -- most of it preached to the economists who don't need it, rather than the politicians who do -- the only real action taken by President Clinton during his two-day summit in Moscow was this: He and Yeltsin agreed to slash their nuclear stockpiles by 50 tons of plutonium each, and to share sensitive information on each other's missile launches. Arms control and early warning systems may not seem so relevant at a time like this, and 50 tons represents barely a quarter of Russia's plutonium stockpile. Even so, it is a telling sign of the deepening crisis that the U.S. is keeping the threat of an accidental apocalypse very much in mind.

"Plainly, the Pentagon considers Russia's political instability a threat," says TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson. "When you're talking about a country with 22,000 nuclear weapons, you want to know they're in safe hands." Indeed, on a day when Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov muttered darkly that "Yeltsin is pushing the nation to a civil war" and Olympic-level athletes threatened to pull out of a Moscow track meet for fear of being injured in a coup, it's not hard to see why.

Quite apart from the political instability, Washington is worried about Russia's creaky and cash-starved early warning system spewing out false information of an impending attack. But with the details of both accords still waiting to be hammered out, perhaps Clinton would do better by simply asking to take all the nukes home with him.