WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. President George W. Bush intends to ask Russian President Vladimir Putin next week to cooperate with the United States in joint projects to defend against missile attack.
If the Russian leader accepts the offer it would mean a turnabout in Putin's skepticism about missile defenses while accelerating cooperation between Washington and Moscow on a number of fronts.
According to a senior U.S. official, Bush also will offer to share American technology with Russia, a move first proposed by President Ronald Reagan two decades ago as part of his space-defense dream.
Bush's intention is to enshrine anti-missile cooperation in a document of strategic cooperation that will be issued when he meets Putin in Moscow. The move would be parallel to the treaty the two leaders have approved to slash U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear weapons.
Putin had opposed the U.S. missile defense program as apt to re-ignite a dangerous arms race by encouraging potential aggressors to develop better nuclear weapons to overcome an anti-missile shield.
Bush is proposing cooperation in so-called theater missile defenses - regional systems designed to guard against terrorist groups and so-called rogue regimes.
National missile defenses were banned in a 1972 treaty that Bush has canceled because it stood in the way of his ambitious U.S. testing program. On June 14, the first day the U.S. government is freed from the treaty's strictures, work on underground silos for missile interceptors will begin in Alaska.
Cooperation between the United States and Russia is surging.
Russia has strengthened ties with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, backed the United States in revising sanctions on exports to Iraq and reached agreement on nuclear weapons reductions.
At the same time, Bush has abandoned the 1993 START II weapons reduction treaty his father signed a week before leaving office. It would have banned Russia's multi-warhead SS18 missiles.
John Holum, who was in charge of arms control policy at the State Department in the Clinton administration, criticized the Bush administration for not making deeper cuts in warheads in the new treaty.
It requires the United States and Russia to reduce to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads by 2012. The private Arms Control Association estimates the United States had 7,206 warheads in January and that Russia had 5,606.
"The international community will have a hard time figuring out why we have to keep so many nuclear weapons," Holum said at a conference arranged by the association.
Karl Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, urged Bush to seek a comprehensive inventory of Russia's tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapons stockpile.
Inderfurth said Russia could have from 4,000 to 15,000 of the weapons.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said another issue that ought to be on the summit agenda is clarifying what is going on at U.S. and Russian nuclear test sites.
Kimball cited U.S. intelligence reports that Russia may be preparing to test again. And, he said, the Bush administration has been drifting in the direction of nuclear testing by distancing itself from the 1996 treaty to ban all nuclear tests.
The Senate voted against ratifying the treaty in 1999 and Bush has vowed not to seek Senate approval. But he has extended a moratorium on U.S. testing.
For several months, officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration have considered whether the administration should "unsign" the treaty as it did a treaty to establish an international war crimes tribunal, but there has been no decision to do so.