U.S. to Seek Limits for On-Site Arms Verification, Officials Say

The Reagan Administration, retreating from a key tenet of its arms-control policy, will propose sharply limiting on-site inspections under a superpower treaty eliminating medium- and shorter-range missiles, U.S officials said Monday.

The proposal was approved by President Reagan over the weekend and sent to U.S. negotiators, who plan to present it to the Soviets today at the arms negotiations in Geneva, the officials said.

The proposal would retract previous U.S. demands for continuous on-site inspection of Soviet missile production, assembly and maintenance plants, the officials said.

It would also sharply limit the right of either side to send a team of inspectors on short notice to the site of a suspected treaty violation in the other’s territory--a procedure that the Administration has long demanded in response to alleged Soviet violations of previous arms treaties.

U.S. officials said the principal reason for the shift is opposition from U.S. intelligence agencies and European allies to Soviet inspections of sensitive Western military facilities.

A secondary reason is the Soviet agreement in July to give up medium- and shorter-range missiles on a global basis, not just in Western Europe. U.S. officials said this decision makes it harder for the Soviets to deploy covert missile forces because associated missile assembly and maintenance facilities would all have to be destroyed.

The U.S. shift comes at a time when the Soviets, in a reversal of their traditional policy, have stressed the need for on-site inspections and aggressively demanded access to facilities that Western governments want declared off-limits.

Specifically, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the FBI and the Department of Energy demanded that so-called “challenge” inspections be prohibited in areas where sensitive intelligence-gathering equipment or nuclear weapon technologies might be observed.

Similarly, Britain and West Germany objected to Soviet challenge inspections of suspected U.S. missile deployment sites near their own sensitive military bases.