Was I the only one who noticed? Ever since the end of the Cold War (that breeding ground of massive numbers of nuclear warheads), U.S. policy toward Russia has been to get rid of as many Russian nuclear weapons as possible. Yet when the Russians recently proposed eliminating up to 1,000 strategic nuclear warheads -- more than current arms-control talks have considered -- the Clinton administration said no.

What's going on here? It's a bit like the old Abbot and Costello comedy routine, "Who's on first" (Who being the name of a baseball player). The administration simply said it "needed" the 2,000 to 2,500 warheads that would remain if a START 3 treaty now under discussion is implemented. But Moscow wanted to go lower, to 1500. At times they have suggested going down to 1000, and Russia's defense minister has said that by the end of the next decade, Russia could not afford to have more than 500 warheads. The United States wants cuts; so does Russia. But the U.S. doesn't want those cuts.

It doesn't want to go any lower because it needs these weapons for nuclear deterrence, according to U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin. But who exactly is it deterring, and how many weapons does it need for the deterrent to be credible? China, which U.S. President Bill Clinton has talked of as a "strategic partner," has a grand total of 20 strategic warheads that could hit the U.S. Would-be nuclear powers like North Korea, Iran and Iraq would have only a handful if they did manage to join the club. Russia, which has 6,000 strategic warheads, is no longer an adversary.