November 15, 2000 By PATRICK E. TYLER MOSCOW, Nov. 14 Unwilling to wait for a declared winner in the American presidential race, the Kremlin has mounted a diplomatic offensive to advertise its desire to make deep cuts in the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States as soon as possible after a new president takes office. With a statement directed at Washington by President Vladimir V. Putin on Monday, followed by presentations today by a senior military commander and a top foreign ministry official, the Russian leadership chose this week of electoral chaos in the United States to make its case. No matter who wins the election, the Russians said, Moscow is eager to move swiftly to eliminate the cost of maintaining large strategic nuclear forces a decade after the end of the cold war. "What counts most now is that Russia and the United States start moving jointly or along parallel courses toward radically lowered ceilings on nuclear warheads without any holdups," Mr. Putin said before leaving for Mongolia and then Brunei for a summit meeting of Asian and Pacific leaders. While in Brunei, Mr. Putin and President Clinton will meet for the last scheduled time before Mr. Clinton leaves office. Russian officials hinted that Moscow might be ready to negotiate amendments to a treaty banning missile defenses, something Washington wants, if cuts in offensive weapons are deep enough. The commander of Russia's strategic rocket forces, Gen. Vladimir N. Yakolev, warned Monday that Russia would find it "very difficult" to stop the political momentum in the United States for building a national missile shield to defend against attacks by rogue states and accidental launchings. Therefore, he said, Russia should make a new deal with Washington: trading any American buildup in missile defenses for deeper cuts perhaps deeper than Russia's cuts in offensive weapons. The reason for the pressing Russian initiative, say analysts here and in the United States, has more to do with Moscow's domestic economic and security concerns than with American politics. Saddled with an unfinished military campaign in Chechnya and a general deterioration of Russian conventional forces that may have contributed to the disaster that sank the nuclear submarine Kursk in August, Mr. Putin is pressing his military commanders to slash the still bloated Russian armed forces by a third or more. His goal is to build a smaller and more capable fighting force to defend Russia against threats of Islamic extremism in Central Asia and ethnic tensions loosed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. To finance the modernization of Russia's conventional armed forces, Mr. Putin would like to avoid the large expenditures necessary to maintain several thousand strategic nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. "Certainly we would like to save money on weapons that are never supposed to be used," said Aleksei G. Arbatov, a member of the defense committee of the Russian Parliament. "Nuclear weapons are virtual weapons, designed and deployed never to be used," he said in an interview, "and this is the best area to seek economy while using our available resources for peacekeeping, or for countering ethnic or religious extremists and the destabilization which follows them." In his statement on Monday, Mr. Putin said Russia was prepared "to consider even lower levels" than the 1,500 warheads presented by its negotiators in Geneva earlier this year at the outset of negotiations for a Start III agreement. Some officials said Mr. Putin would like to cut strategic arsenals to 1,000 weapons each. Such a cut would require the incoming American president to issue a new directive to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to further reduce the list of targets in the highly classified plans for defending the United States in a nuclear conflict. Those war plans set a floor of 2,500 nuclear weapons necessary to cover all targets in current war plans. Both presidential contenders have given Russia some hope that a compromise can be reached. In May, Gov. George W. Bush declared that Russia "is no longer our enemy" and said that if elected he would order the Pentagon to conduct a new assessment "of our nuclear force posture" with a goal of significant further reductions, while also moving forward with a national missile shield even if Russia refused to amend the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which prohibits the deployment of nationwide missile defenses. If elected, Vice President Al Gore has said he would seek to negotiate with Russia on amendments to the antimissile treaty to allow deployment of missile defenses, while also seeking further reductions in offensive weapons. Ivo H. Daalder, an arms control expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said Mr. Bush's declaration demonstrated to the Russians that both candidates held out the promise of supporting much deeper cuts in the nuclear arsenals. Mr. Bush would support deep cuts while ignoring Russian concerns about missile defenses, thus freeing the Russians to take other steps to counter American defenses. But the net result would be fewer offensive weapons. "The fact that the Republicans were the ones to break through the wall when it comes to going lower than 2,500 weapons provides the underpinnings" for a bipartisan American consensus to reduce offensive weapons, Mr. Daalder said. Russia and the United States signed the Start II agreement in 1993, calling for cutting the superpower nuclear arensals in half to 3,000 to 3,500 weapons each and eliminating Russia's force of large multiple- warhead missiles. But the struggle to win full approval for the treaty has carried over to this year. The Senate approved the treaty in 1996, but the Russian Parliament, dominated by Communist members, objected to its terms until April. It was approved after the election of a non-Communist majority. Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company