Test Ban Treaty Ratified by Lower House in Russia

MOSCOW —  Russia seized the moral high ground on nuclear nonproliferation Friday when the lower house of parliament ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty--which the U.S. Senate rejected last year.

The Duma’s approval of the pact, just one week after lawmakers ended seven years of foot-dragging by endorsing the START II arms-control treaty, was yet another sign of the strength of Russian President-elect Vladimir V. Putin, who has put nuclear arms reduction at the center of his foreign policy.

Putin may use the Russian ratification of the two treaties to pressure the U.S. as a confrontation looms over Washington’s hopes for a renegotiation of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

The Russian president-elect has bluntly opposed a U.S. plan to build a national missile defense shield, which would require renegotiation of the missile treaty.

Russian officials Friday reaffirmed their opposition to any U.S. effort to undermine the ABM treaty and declared that Moscow is now in a strong negotiating position just days before a U.N. nonproliferation conference in New York.

“This is an additional argument which will help to put pressure on the United States to give up its plan to develop antimissile defenses,” said Dmitri Rogozin, head of the Duma committee on international affairs. “If the Americans find themselves in isolation, they will have to blame themselves.”

President Clinton pushed hard to have the test ban treaty ratified in the United States last year, but the Senate narrowly rejected the accord on a mostly party-line vote, citing concerns that compliance would be impossible to monitor and that the United States would be unable to maintain and modernize its arsenal. The treaty aims to reduce the development of nuclear arms by prohibiting testing worldwide.

In Washington, Clinton applauded the Duma’s vote Friday and acknowledged that “many U.S. friends and allies” have approved the test ban treaty.

“Approval . . . by Russia--as well as the recent approvals by Chile, Bangladesh and Turkey--renews momentum for the international effort to halt the spread of nuclear weapons and promote disarmament around the world,” the president said in a written statement.

White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart expressed confidence that the Senate will eventually ratify the pact.

With his political standing high after his victory in last month’s presidential election and a decline in Communist forces in the Duma, Putin has shown that he can push changes easily through both houses of parliament.

Deputies voted 298-74 to ratify the test ban treaty after Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev, Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov and Atomic Energy Minister Yevgeny O. Adamov urged them to support it. The Duma expressed concern over the failure of the U.S. Senate to ratify.

Ivanov said Russia’s ratification of the treaty proves that arms control is a top priority for Putin.

“This step can be seen as the hallmark of Russia’s new leadership in the foreign policy sphere,” Ivanov said.

But analysts said that Russia’s efforts to press the U.S. over the ABM treaty appear doomed, with Washington likely to press ahead with the missile shield despite opposition in Russia and Europe.

Russia fears that the proposed national missile defense shield would render its own deterrent capabilities obsolete. Putin has warned that Russia will repudiate START II and other arms-control treaties if the United States proceeds with its plans for the shield.

Anatol Lieven, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, said ratifying the treaty not only gives Russia the moral high ground but also works in its strategic interests.

“I think the perception is that Russia doesn’t lose by this--it actually gains,” he said. “It’s a great way to make Russia look more responsible and internationalist than the U.S. It puts America in the wrong and gains Russia credit in Europe.”

Lieven said the test ban treaty would freeze the advantages of Russia and the U.S. as the nations with the most powerful nuclear arsenals, making it impossible for other countries to catch up.

The test ban treaty was signed in 1996 but can take effect only after being ratified by all 44 nuclear-capable states. Until Friday, only 29 had done so. Russia has not exploded a nuclear weapon since 1990, and the U.S. has had a moratorium on tests for eight years. India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998.

Some left-wing lawmakers, including Deputy Nikolai Kharitonov of the Agrarian Party, opposed the ratification.

“We are seriously concerned that, in the last couple of weeks, there has been a kind of ratification race in this country while the president has not yet taken office and the government has still not been formed,” he complained.

Pavel Felgenhauer, military analyst with the daily newspaper Sevodnya, said the arms-reduction treaties had already lost their significance because Russia has been unable to compete with the U.S. militarily or economically.

“In this light, I don’t understand why we need these clumsy propaganda moves now. There is no sense in it,” he said. “But our young diplomats are successfully employing their fathers’ Cold War methods, seemingly still unaware that the Cold War is over.”

Andrei A. Piontkovsky, director of the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies, a Moscow-based think tank, said the ratification of the treaties was a way of neutralizing Western criticism of Russia’s war in the separatist republic of Chechnya.

Nikolai Voloshin, chief of the Atomic Energy Ministry’s nuclear warheads testing and development department, said there is equality between Russia and the U.S., with both sides observing moratoriums on nuclear weapons testing.

In an interview on Echo of Moscow radio, Voloshin said he is confident that Russia can keep its nuclear arsenal current through computer-simulated tests.

“The U.S. has new supercomputers, and we also have new computers,” he said. “In other words, we are not lagging behind the United States in any way in keeping our nuclear arsenal in a safe state.”

* Times staff writer James Gerstenzang in Washington contributed to this report.