Soviets Give 3 U.S. Lawmakers a Tour of Controversial Radar Site

An American congressional delegation has made an unprecedented visit to the controversial Soviet radar installation near the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Rep. Bob Carr (D-Mich.) said Sunday.

Carr said that he, Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Jim Moody (D-Wis.) will make a “substantial” report on their findings at a Washington news conference Tuesday.

They are believed to be the first official American visitors to the Krasnoyarsk site.

In this year’s edition of “Soviet Military Power,” the U.S. Defense Department said that the large radar at Krasnoyarsk could be the final link in a Soviet ballistic missile early warning system that could be operating by the mid-1990s.

Once these radars are built, the Defense Department report said, the Soviet Union could move quickly to deploy a national ABM defense.

The congressional visit apparently was designed by the Soviets to undercut the Pentagon’s allegations and show that Moscow had nothing to hide.

“The visit was another demonstration of the open policy of the Soviet Union aimed at the preservation of peace and the strengthening of confidence among states,” the Tass news agency reported Sunday.

It said the U.S. delegation looked over the state of construction work, the equipment and technical characteristics of what American military experts term a “large, phased array radar.” Tass said this provided “concrete confirmation” of the Soviet Union’s intention to conform to the requirements of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The Pentagon has charged that the Krasnoyarsk facility violates the ABM treaty since its design, location and orientation make clear that it was intended for tracking incoming missiles.

“The radar is not located on the periphery of the Soviet Union and pointed outward, as required for early warning radars,” the Pentagon publication said.

“It is some 750 kilometers (466 miles) from the nearest border--Mongolia--and it is oriented not toward that border but across approximately 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) of Soviet territory to the northeast.” The Soviet Union, however, claims that the Krasnoyarsk site is designed for tracking space vehicles and is not part of a missile defense system.

Yevgeny P. Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a top scientific adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, accompanied the U.S. delegation.

Downey is the leader of a group in the House of Representatives that is pushing for a new treaty to limit underground nuclear tests to one kiloton instead of the existing ceiling of 150 kilotons.