Cheating on Arms Treaty Not Worth It, Experts Say : Time May Be Best Guarantor of Honesty

The treaty banning ground-launched medium-range missiles that President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev will sign today provides for elaborate and intrusive measures to ensure compliance, but it still cannot guarantee that there will be no cheating.

Conservatives are already calling this sufficient reason for the Senate to refuse to ratify the historic treaty. But treaty proponents insist that the Soviets are unlikely to cheat, even though they might get away with it, because the advantages they might gain from cheating pale beside the international condemnation they would receive if they were caught.

“The Soviets can legally deploy longer-range missiles to aim at European targets now covered by their medium-range missiles,” explained Kenneth L. Adelman, outgoing director of U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “Why cheat by keeping the illegal missiles and risk getting caught?”

During the first several years of the treaty, the probability of catching any cheating will be less than 50%, according to many experts, because of initial uncertainty about whether each side has told the other about all the missiles that it has squirreled away.

The odds will increase, perhaps to as much as 90%, during the 13-year life of the treaty--thanks largely to the fact that whichever side decided to cheat would have to test its missiles to ensure that they still worked, and tests are relatively easy for the other side to detect.

When tested, every type of missile has a distinctive “signature”--the heat from its rocket, for example, or radio signals from its various internal mechanisms--that can be recognized by the other side.

“The Soviet Union has 7 million square miles of area, and our inspectors can’t visit 6.99 million miles of them,” said a U.S. official who asked not to be identified. “But they can’t hide a missile flight test.”

In all the history of nuclear arms control, this is the first treaty that has called on the superpowers not just to limit the future deployment of missiles but to dismantle weapons they already have. The treaty provides that each side will eliminate its nuclear missiles that have a range of 300 to 3,000 miles, along with associated equipment such as launchers. No additional missiles can be produced, stored or deployed.

Toughest Ever

At the insistence of the United States, the bulk of the treaty’s 200 pages deal with verifying compliance with the treaty. The verification system that has been established is the most elaborate and intrusive the superpowers have ever agreed to in an arms accord.

Each side will have inspectors on hand as the other destroys its weapons. They will be able to watch as nuclear warheads are removed, to be later recycled in other weapons. They will see nose cones and missile frames crushed or otherwise destroyed, rocket motors burned and the axles of mobile launching vehicles cut in half. For the first six months, each side can destroy up to 100 missiles by launching them harmlessly into a test range in the ocean or the Central Asian desert, according to U.S. officials.

In an effort to ensure that neither side simply replaces old weapons with new ones, each will continue to be able to keep a close eye on the other. Soviet inspectors will establish a permanent presence just outside the gates of a missile plant in Magna, Utah, 16 miles from Salt Lake City; U.S. inspectors will do likewise at a missile plant in the Ural Mountains.

More than that, each side, with only nine hours’ warning, will be able to make a fixed number of visits each year to the declared missile facilities of the other to make sure that nothing is going on that the treaty prohibits.

Difficult Compilation

Each nation’s missile sites--production, maintenance and storage facilities and bases where the missiles are deployed--are identified in an annex to the treaty by longitude and latitude, although compiling all the data proved difficult.

The Soviets were late in providing the information the United States needed, and the U.S. side erred in giving one set of coordinates; the site turned out to be a lake. After the Soviets protested, the coordinates were corrected, according to a senior U.S. official.

All the declared sites will be inspected by the other side. But each side might also have hundreds of additional missiles--estimates range up to 300, plus as many launchers--hidden in distant warehouses. Inspectors cannot visit those sites.

The reason “we can’t go anywhere, anytime, anyplace in the Soviet Union,” said a senior Administration official, “is because we don’t want the Soviets to go anytime, anywhere, anyplace in the United States.”

“There will clearly be opportunities to cheat, lots of them,” said Michael Krepon, verification specialist for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

‘Will Never Be High’

“There will be low confidence, in my view, that the inventory count is correct but high confidence in detecting missile tests,” Krepon added. “Overall, there will be moderate confidence that the treaty can be verified. Overall, it will never be high.”

Adelman took a somewhat rosier view. Although cheaters could probably escape undetected during the first three years of the treaty, he said, the chances of detecting cheating will rise to 50% by three years and possibly as high as 90% during the final years of the 13-year accord.

Despite these odds, Adelman insisted, “the treaty will be effectively verifiable. We’ll have high verifiability in the end that we’ll catch any militarily significant cheating,” in large part because “the incentive to cheat is very low.”

Moreover, the Soviets deployed their medium-range missiles primarily as weapons to intimidate Western Europe politically, Adelman said. If they are secreted away, he pointed out, “they would not be intimidating, like a lion in the next room you don’t know about.”

Easier Than Ceilings

The fact that all medium-range missiles are to be destroyed will make verification easier because even a single missile would represent a treaty violation. By contrast, with a treaty that merely sets ceilings on missiles--as this treaty had been envisioned until recent months--violations can be proved when one side counts all the weapons that the other possesses at any one time.

The Soviets have declared that they possess 1,941 missiles of medium range, either deployed or in storage, at 128 sites. The weapons are four kinds of ballistic missiles: SS-20, SS-4, SS-12/22 and SS-23.

The United States has declared 859 missiles at about 30 comparable sites, one-third of which are at U.S. bases in Europe. The weapons are Pershing 1-A and Pershing 2 ballistic missiles and the Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missile.

Four types of inspection will be permitted at both sides’ missile sites:

1.--Starting 60 days after the Senate ratifies the treaty, each side will have three years to eliminate its medium-range missiles. During that period, inspectors from each superpower will be able to watch as the other side dismantles its weapons and to confirm that the missiles and launchers are no longer at the declared sites.

Updated Information

For those three years, the treaty requires that all missiles and launchers must be placed in agreed-upon areas or in announced transit between those areas. Each side must give the other updated information on the location of missile support facilities and missile operating bases, including the number of missiles and launchers at each location.

2.--For the entire 13-year life of the treaty, several dozen inspectors from each nation will be stationed outside the doors of one of the other nation’s missile sites.

The U.S. facility in Utah is a Hercules Co. plant that produced the solid rocket engines for medium-range Pershing missiles and still makes similar engines for the land-based MX intercontinental missile and for the submarine-launched D-5 (also called the Trident 2) ballistic missile.

The Soviet facility is at Votkinsk in the Ural Mountains, where the SS-20 and a similar but longer-range SS-25 are assembled. U.S. inspectors will seek to verify that only the legal SS-25s come out on the single railroad line leading from the facility.

Sealed Canisters

The missiles emerge in sealed canisters, and the canisters containing the SS-25s are about three feet longer and heavier than those bearing the SS-20s. Besides checking the canisters’ weight and dimensions, U.S. inspectors will also be able to X-ray the canisters, which are not metallic, and there are indications--details not yet announced--that they will also be able to break the seals on a portion of the canisters, perhaps 10% of them, to inspect and photograph their contents, according to one U.S. official.

3.--Each side will have the right to make short-notice visits to the declared missile facilities of the other. The number of permitted inspections is 20 a year during the first three years of the treaty, 15 a year during the next five years and 10 a year for the final five years. U.S. personnel will be visiting Soviet facilities virtually every day of the year, according to an intelligence analyst.

The inspectors must arrive at one of two entry points: Washington or San Francisco in the United States, Moscow or Irkutsk, in Siberia, in the Soviet Union. Within four hours, they must tell their host which site they wish to visit. Within nine hours, in order to provide little time for any illegal missiles to be hidden, the host must transport the inspectors to the site.

Maps of each site are to be exchanged in cases in which only certain buildings at a declared site are associated with the banned missiles. Inspectors cannot enter the non-declared buildings if their doors are too small to permit missile components to pass through, but inspectors can demand that the host side satisfy the visitors that the non-declared buildings at the site are not harboring banned material.

4.--The final, unique form of inspection was required because of the similarities between the SS-20 and SS-25 missiles. Both have been deployed at times on the same base, as well as on separate bases. U.S. inspectors will have visiting rights to the mixed bases to check that all the SS-20s are removed.

Satellite Checks

At the strictly SS-25 bases, the Soviets refused to permit U.S. inspectors. However, the United States won the right to tell the Soviets when to slide the door back on an SS-25 hangar and move the missile into the open so that a U.S. reconnaissance satellite can determine that the missile is an SS-25 and not an SS-20.

Complaints about failure to comply with the treaty will go to a verification commission, whose members will be appointed by both nations. “If we don’t get satisfaction,” said a senior Administration official who asked not to be named, “then we retain our rights to declare the violation, and if we think it is of such significance, then we would take whatever action is appropriate.”

But for all the elaborate verification procedures, a senior Administration official said the best assurance that the Soviets are complying will come with the passing years. It will be very difficult, he said, for the Soviets to compensate for years of not testing missiles, not training the troops who operate them and not maintaining the necessary support facilities.

“It will make little sense 10 years from now,” he said, “to try to be introducing any treaty-limited item into your force structure.”