San Diego Plant Apparently Included : Soviets Accept Inspection Offer, Clear Way for Pact

Verification measures to ensure compliance with the new U.S.-Soviet missile treaty were the most difficult issues to negotiate and were the last items to be completed on Tuesday, according to U.S. officials here.

It wasn’t until the final minutes of Tuesday’s negotiation session that Soviet officials accepted a U.S. offer to allow Soviet inspection of a U.S. ballistic missile production facility and a plant where cruise missile launchers are made, in return for U.S. inspection rights at comparable Soviet facilities.

“They thought we were just bluffing,” a senior U.S. official said, “that we would back off our demand rather than allow their inspectors at our plants. But we were not bluffing, and they gave in in the end.”

As a result, the treaty, if ratified, will permit about 30 or 40 Soviet inspectors to be stationed at a plant producing Pershing 2 ballistic missiles, probably a Martin Marietta facility at Orlando, Fla., for the 13-year duration of the treaty. And intermittent Soviet inspections will be permitted at the General Dynamics plant in San Diego, which makes the launcher-transporter vehicle for ground-launched cruise missiles, according to U.S. officials.

Both the Pershing 2 and the ground-launched cruise missiles are to be banned under the treaty.

Plants Not Named

Secretary of State George P. Shultz refused to identify the plants by name and location Tuesday until the companies and the congressmen from the states concerned are notified. However, other senior U.S. officials provided sufficient information to narrow the field greatly.

The ground launcher for the cruise missile is produced only at the San Diego facility, and the Pershing 2 is made only at Orlando. Nonetheless, Soviet negotiators may have opted to inspect a plant in Colorado that once produced the Pershing 2 missile, also covered by the treaty. Although the Pershing is obsolete and no longer in production, the facility now makes components for the MX intercontinental missile, a type unaffected by the proposed treaty.

The Soviets may thus get to monitor production facilities for a missile not covered by the treaty. The situation arose because U.S. negotiators insisted on inspection rights at a particular ballistic missile facility--at Votkinsk, east of the Ural Mountains in the Soviet Union. That facility assembles both the SS-20 medium-range missile, which will be banned by the treaty, and the SS-25 intercontinental missile, which will not be covered by the pact.

U.S. negotiators insisted on inspecting this facility because the lower stage of both the SS-20 and SS-25 missiles are essentially the same and the two missiles are “visually indistinguishable” to spy satellites, officials said.

Many of the other verification measures in the agreement had been revealed in principle previously, although not in their full scope and detail.

For example, during the first three years of the treaty--when the missiles are to be eliminated--there will be an unrestricted number of inspections to determine if the initial missile count is correct, that the missiles are being destroyed and their warheads dismantled and, finally, that all of the weapons are gone.

The treaty also provides for inspection of places where one side suspects the other of hiding missiles.

Hundreds of Inspectors

Hundreds of Soviet and U.S. inspectors will be involved in the so-called challenge inspections of suspect sites, U.S. officials said.

They stressed, however, that neither these nor the permanent plant inspections will give officials direct access to the actual production areas in the plants. Instead, inspectors will monitor missiles as they leave the production facilities.

The pact specifies that the inspectors must enter the countries at one of two ports in each--Washington or San Francisco, Moscow or Irkutsk (Siberia).

Within four hours of arrival, they may specify the site to be inspected, and must be taken there within a day. They may remain there for up to a day.

The inspectors may only visit facilities that have been associated with the medium-range missiles.

In addition, the Soviets have agreed to satellite inspection of SS-25 bases where SS-20s had never been located.

This will be done when U.S. inspectors notify the Soviets, probably through the newly established risk-reduction centers in both countries, that a specific site is to be made ready within a few hours.

Then the the missile silo doors will be opened and the missiles rolled into the open, for photographing by U.S. satellites.

“You can be sure the sun will be shining and our satellites in position when we undertake that kind of inspection,” a senior official said.