Perle Backs Non-Nuclear Cruise Missiles

Richard N. Perle, formerly the Pentagon’s top arms control expert, Thursday urged the Senate to amend the proposed medium-range missile treaty to allow the United States to retain non-nuclear ground-launched cruise missiles, a change that Administration officials quickly attacked as presenting a “verification nightmare.”

Perle, who resigned last year as an assistant secretary of defense, was one of the authors of the negotiating formula that led to the INF (intermediate-range nuclear forces) treaty signed in December by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

His criticism of the treaty, presented to one of three Senate committees conducting ratification hearings, was among the harshest so far by any official or former official of the Administration. But he said he supports ratification of the treaty, even though he wants it changed.

Perle, regarded as an anti-Soviet hard-liner, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the ban on conventionally armed cruise missiles is “the single most serious defect” in the treaty. He said elimination of the weapon would deprive U.S. military commanders of a highly accurate long-range alternative to nuclear weapons.

The treaty basically calls for eliminating all ground-launched nuclear missiles with ranges between 300 and 3,000 miles and for extensive on-site verification of missile destruction. Non-nuclear ground-launched cruise missiles were included because of the difficulty of distinguishing between missiles carrying nuclear and non-nuclear warheads.

Administration officials on Thursday defended the ban on conventionally armed cruise missiles, which Perle consistently and unsuccessfully opposed during his service in the government and afterward.

Allowing non-nuclear cruise missiles “would have been a verification nightmare,” an Administration official said Thursday in response to Perle’s testimony. Proving that a missile carried a non-nuclear rather than a nuclear warhead would require extremely intrusive inspections of military facilities, and “nobody was wild about the Soviets peeking into how our cruise missiles are constructed and wired,” said the official, who asked not to be identified by name.

Could Require Renegotiation

Administration officials also contended that such a significant change in the treaty would require renegotiation with the Soviets and could wreck the chances for an agreement. Perle also charged that Administration negotiators, in their haste to conclude a medium-range missile pact with the Soviets, created a document filled with ambiguities, loopholes and dangerous precedents for future arms control agreements. He said these flaws should be corrected by the Senate before ratification.

Meanwhile, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that one of the more attractive aspects of the treaty is that it commits the Soviet Union to dismantling SS-20 missiles, which are capable of reaching targets in Asia.

“I consider it one of the more salient virtues of the treaty,” Crowe said.

Crowe and other members of the joint chiefs had earlier endorsed the treaty in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Gen. Larry D. Welch, the Air Force chief of staff, also dismissed assertions by Perle and others that the treaty was dangerously flawed because the Soviets might conceal a sizable force of the banned SS-20s, which could be launched from equipment designed for the still-legal SS-25 intercontinental missile.

Noting that the treaty bans test flights, Welch told senators that any missiles hidden in storage would become “useless.”

“In order to have any confidence that your missile force is a viable, ready force, it has to be exercised constantly,” he said.