Keep Missiles Aimed, Cheney Urges : Arms: He says U.S. can’t verify Russia’s promise to stop targeting cities and should not reciprocate.

WASHINGTON —  The United States cannot verify whether Russia is following through on its promise to remove American cities from its nuclear target list, and Washington should not plan to reciprocate without such proof, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said Thursday.

Two days after Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin announced his targeting intentions, Cheney warned that the United States should not abandon its policy of keeping U.S. nuclear missiles trained on targets in the former Soviet Union.

Cheney, one of the Bush Administration’s leading skeptics on the prospects for reform in the new Commonwealth of Independent States, is expected to accompany President Bush to his Camp David retreat Saturday for a meeting with Yeltsin.

Cheney’s advice to Bush on arms control and U.S. military policies has been vital in shaping U.S. arms policy.

Although Cheney said that he thinks Yeltsin’s “heart is in the right place” when it comes to scaling back Russia’s military, he cautioned against deeper reductions in U.S. arms than those already outlined by the Bush Administration.

Cheney made the comments to a small group of reporters a day after unveiling his department’s $280-billion fiscal 1993 budget request.

The new defense blueprint proposes reductions of $63 billion over the next six years and would halt virtually all Pentagon programs aimed at modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Responding more positively to another Yeltsin initiative, Cheney indicated Thursday that he would be willing to discuss further technological cooperation with Russia in the development of missile defenses.

Yeltsin said Wednesday that his country would drop its longstanding opposition to missile defenses if Russia were permitted to help develop such a system.

“Until now, we have not been prepared to go beyond fairly limited sharing (of technology), for example, in the area of early warning of missile launches,” Cheney said. But as other nations get nuclear weapons, “defenses take on greater significance,” he added.

Cheney also said that he hopes to get from Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov--the acting commander in chief of the forces of the Commonwealth, which has largely replaced the old Soviet Union--a detailed assessment of Commonwealth defense plans, including the proposed mix of land- and sea-based missiles and bombers.

In its recent arms proposals, the Bush Administration has been trying to persuade the Commonwealth states to reduce their reliance on multiple-warhead, land-based missiles.

Bush on Tuesday offered to reduce by more than half the arsenal of U.S. nuclear warheads--including those on submarines--if the former Soviet Union dismantles all of its multiple-warhead land-based missiles.

Cheney described the Russian president and his Ukrainian counterpart, Leonid Kravchuk, as “leaders now who are eager to cooperate with the West and are prepared to . . . change the size of their military, reduce the number of weapons in their inventory and seek a much more cooperative, non-threatening, non-hostile relationship.”

Cheney said that such trends “can be reversed.” But he added that the degeneration of the former Soviet Union’s military capabilities is “irreversible” over the next five to 10 years. That reasoning, Cheney said, led him to take the unusual step of scaling back or canceling new nuclear weapons systems, including the B-2 bomber, in his 1993 budget plan.

But Cheney rejected the advice of some independent experts who believe that in response to developments in the Commonwealth, the United States can move toward “minimum deterrence.” Under that concept, the United States would maintain a small but invulnerable force of missiles--carried, for example, aboard a single submarine--sufficient to threaten retaliation against any nuclear aggressor.

He cautioned that once each side has reduced its arsenal of nuclear warheads to such low levels, it must continue to spread them over a wide variety of weapons systems--such as submarines, bombers and land-based missiles. Only by playing such a shell game, he added, could the nation ensure that its retaliatory force would remain intact under any conditions.