With a month to go before the Clinton-Putin summit in Moscow, the Pentagon is making it clear that the US will not propose or consider cuts below the expected levels. The current US nuclear arsenal includes 7,000 deployed weapons. This is to drop to 6,000 under START I by Dec 2001, and then to 3,500 under START II by 2007. The US and Russia agreed that START III would see cuts to about 2,500 weapons, but Russian President Putin recently proposed cutting arsenals to 1,500 weapons, a number the Pentagon rejects as threatening US security.--Stephen V Cole