Arms-Pact Verification Poses Dilemma for U.S. : Dozens of Soviets Could Be Sent to American Military Facilities; Security Problems Foreseen

For six years, the Reagan Administration has berated the Soviets for failing to comply with existing arms accords and demanded that any future agreements be accompanied by strict, on-site inspection procedures for verifying compliance.

Now, as the two sides appear to be on the brink of a breakthrough on eliminating medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe, the Soviets are threatening to say yes to verification.

If they do, that would eliminate the most difficult obstacle to an arms control accord that could be the highlight of President Reagan’s final two years in office.

But it might also embarrass him. The President, who has vowed to reduce Soviet opportunities for espionage, could be required to accept a permanent presence in the United States of Soviet inspectors with access to super-secret military installations in Southern California and around the nation.

“It’s easy to talk about verification,” Secretary of State George P. Shultz said last week, “but when it comes home to roost, it is a different matter.”

‘Hellish Problem’

Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) acknowledged that on-site inspection “will be a hellish problem. It won’t be insurmountable, and we need it to verify any treaty with the Soviets, but it will be one hellish problem.”

Wilson is a former mayor of San Diego, where many defense plants are situated.

The Reagan Administration itself last Thursday proposed stringent steps to police a ban on medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe. U.S. officials said privately that the offer entailed assigning 200 Soviets to between six and 14 facilities where U.S. missiles are produced, assembled, stored and maintained. The United States would have a similar presence in the Soviet Union.

Assistant Defense Secretary Richard N. Perle said the United States, a much more open society than the Soviet Union, has more to learn from access to Soviet facilities than vice versa.

However, Michael Krepon of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wondered: “Would (the benefits of) a continuous Soviet presence on our territory outweigh the risk (of espionage)?”

‘More Demanding Than You’

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has already accepted on-site inspection in principle. He has even told American visitors, according to a U.S. official who asked not to be identified by name, that “you are apt to find us more demanding than you are.”

When Reagan and Gorbachev met in Iceland last October, they “were outdoing each other on the subject of verification,” Shultz recalled. “The President said, ‘We’re going to have to have strong verification,’ and (Gorbachev) pounded on the table and said, ‘verification will be essential,’ and so on and so on.”

The two leaders’ emphasis masks a continuing dispute among the experts on the value of on-site verification of compliance with arms control agreements.

“The utility of on-site inspection has not been fully examined,” Krepon said. “It has great symbolic value and can be substantively useful, depending on what it’s used for.”

On-site monitoring can be useful, he said, in determining whether nuclear weapons plants are producing more than the permitted number of missiles. Unmanned sensors, he noted, are incapable of making such determinations.

Hidden Weapons

On the other hand, he said, he sees no point in on-site searches for hidden weapons.

“You could open a lot of secret doors without ever being assured you’ve found all their weapons,” Krepon said. “They’d be opening our secret doors, too.”

Walter B. Slocombe, a senior Defense Department arms control official in the Jimmy Carter Administration, agreed that “on-site inspection is vastly overrated, although it will contribute something in terms of monitoring a treaty. But verification provisions are almost exclusively in the U.S. interest and give the Soviets almost nothing.”

And a Defense Department verification expert insisted: “We’re not afraid of the Soviets saying yes. I’d like to see Gorbachev apply his glasnost (openness) policy to arms control. The net benefits will far outweigh the risks to us. There will be some pain, sure, but it is not in U.S. military or political interests to sign up to new arms control agreements without on-site inspection.”

New Issue

Arms control agreements “date from antiquity,” according to William F. Rowell, an Air Force expert on the subject. But verification is a far newer issue.

Treaties limiting the naval forces of the big powers after World War I, for example, contained “no explicit provisions for verification such as inspection of ships under construction,” Rowell wrote in a recent book, “Arms Control Verification.” This was because naval buildups of any significance could be easily detected.

The development of nuclear weapons changed the equation. The possibility that the Soviets could alter the strategic balance by covertly developing and deploying a small number of nuclear weapons led the United States to require that nuclear arms agreements be accompanied by means for monitoring compliance. The closed Soviet society, in the U.S. view, would facilitate a secret arms buildup.

Through the 1950s, arms control efforts foundered on verification as the Soviets charged that U.S. proposals were thinly veiled efforts to set spies loose in their territory.

Seismometers, Satellites

The advent of monitoring systems that could measure events from afar--seismometers to detect nuclear tests, for example, and satellites to observe nuclear missiles--permitted the United States to sign several arms control measures in the 1960s and 1970s, including those limiting the number of long-range nuclear weapons each side could possess.

But now, arms treaties seek to impose constraints on the quality of weapons as well as their number. Moreover, those weapons have become mobile, and there is no assurance that cheating will be detected by the invention of a better reconnaissance satellite.

So, on-site inspection, the most intrusive of verification techniques, has again become a key U.S. demand for any new treaty. The degree of assurance demanded of on-site inspections is far more a political than a technical issue.

As long ago as 1950, President Harry S. Truman called for “disarmament to be policed continuously” with “foolproof” measures--a standard that proved out of reach.

Definition of ‘Adequate’

The Richard M. Nixon Administration set a standard of “adequate” verification in 1969, when strategic arms negotiations began. That standard, adopted by Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Carter, required that the United States be able to detect and respond to Soviet violations before the violations created significant military risk or affected the U.S.-Soviet strategic balance.

That approach ignored the political aspect of treaty compliance. Although the Joint Chiefs of Staff admits that recent Soviet violations of existing treaties have had no military significance, the Reagan Administration has given them an important political dimension simply by making its charges of violations public--and thus affecting public and congressional attitudes toward whether new treaties are worthwhile.

The Reagan Administration raised the verification standard from “adequate” to “effective,” a difference that has been defined in practice, if not on paper. It has branded the verification provisions in existing nuclear test treaties, which were considered “adequate” by its predecessors, to be insufficient.

And now that the United States has proposed a verification package to accompany a ban on medium-range missiles in Europe, the concept of “effective” verification has emerged more clearly. The new proposal will undoubtedly become the model for verifying any future agreement to reduce long-range, offensive nuclear weapons and anti-missile defense systems.

Conflicting Goals

The Administration’s highly intrusive proposal for policing a ban on medium-range missiles in Europe meets its demand for “effective” verification. But by permitting Soviet inspectors at U.S. facilities, the proposal runs against the grain of the Administration’s effort to reduce Soviet access to sensitive U.S. facilities and technology.

“That’s no problem,” Assistant Defense Secretary Perle insisted. “We’re not going to give Soviet inspectors the blueprints for weapons.”

Even before any treaty is signed, inspectors would verify detailed information--precise counts of each side’s missiles, launchers, spares and support equipment--that the the two sides would exchange.

‘Hours Rather Than Days’

After the treaty is in effect, each side would have the right, on short notice, to make a certain number of annual inspections of certain sites, such as operating bases. The number would be negotiated but would be more than 10, an official explained. “Short notice,” he said, “means as rapidly as feasible, hours rather than days.”

Inspectors would be present when missiles were destroyed, dismantled or disassembled according to the treaty’s provisions.

The facilities to which inspectors would be assigned, such as missile plants, would be subjected to continuous monitoring to make sure that no missiles exceed treaty limits--and that no missiles get out secretly through the back door.

And each side would have the right to inspect other facilities suspected of illegally producing, storing or deploying the missiles. The nation to be inspected could not say no.

“If such an inspection were refused,” an official said, “it would be a violation of the treaty.”