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U.S. Faces Arms Decision Amid Soviet Cheating

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Times Staff Writer

“Until the late 1970s,” said Harry Gelman of the Rand Corp., “we knew the Soviets were sharp dealers who would negotiate ambiguities into agreements and take advantage of loopholes, but we thought they didn’t cheat. Now there’s evidence they cheat too.”

Gelman’s view has become dominant within the arms-control community. Yet the Reagan Administration, quick to charge the Soviets publicly with violating existing treaties, remains badly divided over what to do about it.

Breaking the agreements, which continue to serve U.S. interests despite the Soviet violations, appears to be counterproductive. Yet doing nothing may tempt the Soviets to cheat further.

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Uncertain of Value

And the same ambivalence extends to the negotiation of new arms treaties. Even while pressing for ever-stricter measures to verify treaty compliance, the United States has grown uncertain about their value, if no penalties are imposed for cheating.

“Verification is not the basic problem,” one senior official said. “Compliance is.”

Within the arms-control community, the majority view now holds that the Soviets are violating U.S.-Soviet arms agreements in three crucial respects:

--They have built a huge radar station in the middle of Siberia, where it could be used for an anti-missile defense, instead of on the Soviet border.

--They have deployed two new types of intercontinental missiles when only one is permitted.

--They have encoded the information transmitted back to Earth from missile test flights, which impedes U.S. scrutiny of the missiles’ characteristics.

Even Stanford University physicist Wolfgang Panofsky, a veteran supporter of arms-control agreements, recently acknowledged that the Siberian radar station is a “clear violation” of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. “They pick such lousy loopholes,” he complained. “This is very annoying.”

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President Reagan now faces a decision, expected this week, on whether, in light of charges of Soviet treaty violations, to continue complying with the unratified second strategic arms limitation treaty.

“I’m waiting for further reports on the actual violations,” he told a press conference last Wednesday. “I know that I set a policy some time ago that we would continue to observe the restraints of the SALT II treaty (as long as the Soviets also did). . . . We know there have been violations. And we still have not come down hard on . . . what we should do.”

The decision is necessary because a new U.S. Trident submarine, carrying 24 nuclear missile launchers, is about to begin sea trials. The new submarine would put the United States over SALT II’s limits on missile launchers unless it dismantles two old Poseidon submarines with 16 launchers each.

Reagan Choices Listed

Reagan may retaliate against Soviet violations by approving a U.S. violation of the treaty; he could do that by dry-docking rather than dismantling the two Poseidon submarines. He may find other means--sanctioned by SALT II--to offset any advantage the Soviets may have gained by violating the treaty.

Or, as a compromise, a senior Administration official said Tuesday, he may announce that the United States “no longer feels bound by the agreement because of Soviet violations, but if the violations stop, the United States will return to it.”

Whatever route is chosen, the consensus among arms-control champions and skeptics alike is that Soviet violations will deal a body blow to prospects for future accords unless ways are found to erase the three most egregious violations of the total of 18 alleged by the Reagan Administration--and unless the Soviets refrain from additional breaches in the future.

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Troubling Questions

The Soviets began their most blatant treaty violations during the Five-Year Plan in effect in the Soviet Union from 1976 to 1981. To Soviet specialists and arms-control experts, that raises a variety of troubling questions:

--Did the Politburo approve the violations in what Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger terms a “policy of non-compliance?” If so, what is the point of negotiating new agreements?

--Or did the Soviet military bureaucracy take the actions on its own, bypassing the Politburo? In that event, what are the implications of a Soviet military so loosely constrained that it can act independently?

--Or were the actions taken on a case-by-case basis, at the recommendation of the military and with the approval of the Politburo, at a time when detente was providing the Soviets with diminishing benefits and the administrations of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter were unlikely to register more than meek complaints?

Defectors Gave Examples

Most of the experts at a recent Stanford University conference rejected the first two theories, although Gloria Duffy, who directed the conference, noted that the Weinberger view of Soviet duplicity is supported by “a number of Soviet defectors who have provided specific examples of Soviet deception or ill-faith.”

Soviet defector Viktor Suvorov, for example, reported in a 1982 book that the Soviet army has a Directorate of Strategic Deception to coordinate its “cover, concealment and deception” activities. These range from hiding weapons tests and troop movements from U.S. reconnaissance satellites to digging false impact craters at missile target areas to hide the real and greater accuracy of Soviet warheads.

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The Administration complains that the Soviets have violated six arms pacts in all. Its primary charges focus on the main strategic arms agreements: the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the 1972 SALT I accord and the SALT II agreement that Carter signed in 1979.

Although SALT II was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, each side agreed not to undercut its provisions as long as the other showed similar restraint. SALT II was to have expired at the end of 1985, but neither superpower so far has declared itself free of its constraints.

Soviet Sharp Practices

The pattern of sharp Soviet practices was evident even during the negotiations that produced the first strategic arms treaties.

The ABM Treaty, which limited missile defense sites to one for each superpower, also banned anti-missile radars except at “currently or additionally agreed test ranges.” But the Soviets refused to identify the locations of their test sites. The United States finally submitted a list of both sides’ test ranges, but Soviet negotiators made no comment.

A year later, in 1973, the United States discovered a new Soviet test range on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Moscow contended that the Kamchatka range was under construction when the ABM Treaty was signed.

As part of SALT I, the Soviets agreed not to build any more “heavy” intercontinental ballistic missiles, which could carry many more warheads than the light ICBMs deployed by the United States. But they initially refused to define what the words meant and then tested the SS-19 missile, whose volume was midway between light and heavy and whose lifting power was three times that of a light ICBM.

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The United States acquiesced in the Soviet explanation in both cases, in part because the United States had failed to build sufficient precision into the arms agreements.

Imprecision in Pact

Although the United States insisted on greater precision in the language of SALT II, two of the three major Soviet treaty violations alleged by the Reagan Administration involve imprecision in that agreement.

In the first alleged violation, the Soviets began encoding the “telemetry” from the missile tests--the performance data beamed back to Earth from the tests--while SALT I was in effect.

By 1978, as SALT II was being negotiated, the Soviets began heavily encoding signals from their huge SS-18 missile. Nonetheless, the 1979 SALT II agreement left an enormous loophole by barring only the “deliberate denial” of data that would “impede” monitoring of the treaty. The United States wanted to ban all encryption, but the Soviets refused.

In 1980, the Soviets encrypted almost all the data from flight tests of their new submarine-launched SS-N-20 missile. Likewise, in 1982 and 1983, telemetry from tests of the two new Soviet ICBMs, the SS-24 and SS-25, was “extremely heavily encrypted,” according to specialists.

The second major SALT II violation alleged by the Administration is that the Soviets have built two new ICBMs, while only one is permitted.

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Called Modified Missile

The Soviets notified the United States that the 10-warhead SS-24, which it began testing in 1982, was the one permitted by the treaty. The next year, they started on the SS-25, a single-warhead missile that they called a modification of the old SS-13. Both of these weapons were probably born on drafting tables in about 1978, officials believe.

SALT II permits modifications if the improved model’s diameter, length, launch weight and lifting capacity do not exceed those of the old one by more than 5%. The treaty also bars tests of single-warhead ICBMs whose re-entry vehicles weigh less than half of the total lifting capacity--a provision designed to prevent the testing of a single-warhead missile that could be converted to a multiple-warhead weapon.

The Administration officially charged that the SS-25 has “considerably more” lifting power than the 5% margin allowed by SALT II and that its re-entry vehicle is “definitely less” than half the missile’s lifting capacity. Secretly, Weinberger told North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies last year that the SS-25 is 10% longer and 11% bigger around, and a senior official said its warhead weighs only 40% of the total re-entry vehicle.

The third charge is easiest to prove. Even the most dedicated arms-control supporters admit that the radar at Krasnoyarsk, Siberia--two huge slabs of buildings, each two-thirds the height of the Washington Monument--violates the ABM Treaty.

The treaty specifies that all large radar stations of Krasnoyarsk’s type must be on the periphery of each nation and facing outward. On a nation’s periphery, they provide early warning of attack, but located inland, they can serve as “battle management” radars for nationwide missile defense networks. They can predict the targets of incoming enemy warheads and direct other radar stations and associated anti-missile weapons on them.

Krasnoyarsk is 465 miles from the Mongolian border and 1,000 miles from the Arctic Ocean. Its equivalent would be a U.S. radar station in St. Louis.

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When a U.S. satellite spotted the radar station in 1983, the Soviets said its purpose was to track space objects. But a recent article in Scientific American magazine called that explanation “implausible” because the facility could track only “10% of Earth-orbiting satellites--a paltry service for such an expensive construction project.”

A Soviet source said that the decision to build Krasnoyarsk was made in 1978 or 1979, not by top Soviet officials but at a much lower level. Although it may have been a mistake not to recognize that the United States would see the radar as a violation of the ABM Treaty, he said, there was no deliberate intention to cheat.

Participants at the Stanford conference on Soviet compliance generally rejected both the Administration view that the Kremlin had a centrally directed policy of cheating and the alternative theory that the Soviet military engaged in the violations on its own.

Blames Political Forces

Michael Krepon, chief specialist on verification at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believes political forces during the regime of the late Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev are chiefly to blame for the violations.

“By 1979,” he said, “it would have been hard for a political leader, particularly Brezhnev, to say no to the military on such projects because they might jeopardize relations with the United States. You’d already had Soviet intervention in the Horn of Africa and Angola, and our opening to China. . . . There wasn’t much to U.S.-Soviet relations.”

Arnold Horelick, a CIA official during the Carter Administration and now head of the Rand-UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior, said U.S. policy makers should recognize that the Soviets have failed to gain a major military edge from their cheating.

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“The Soviets have chosen to deliberately violate treaties that at most give them marginal advantage,” he said. “So far as we can tell, they have chosen not to violate provisions of treaties that would give them substantial advantage.”

‘Too Much at Stake’

But Jack Matlock, senior Soviet expert on the National Security Council staff, argued against assigning too much importance to the quality of the Soviets’ violations. “They have too much at stake to be the first to break the overall SALT II ceilings (on missiles) or to flagrantly start putting in a whole national ABM system,” he said.

For future agreements, Matlock noted, “it is probably not possible to write an agreement that is absolutely unambiguous in every respect.” At the same time, current arms talks “take us into areas where verification is more and more difficult.” This makes it all the more important, he said, to persuade Soviet leaders to adhere to the treaties of the future.

Several experts said that new arms agreements must include “penalty clauses.” Gelman said the United States must write retaliatory measures into treaty language, or at least obtain congressional concurrence at the time of ratification, so that Moscow will understand that it will have to pay a price for its violations.

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