Congress Deadlock on Mobile Missiles Snags Efforts on New Pact

The Reagan Administration’s efforts to negotiate an agreement with the Soviet Union to reduce long-range nuclear weapons have run into an unexpected stumbling block--a deadlock in Congress over building mobile nuclear missiles.

“It’s a wild show, really confused,” Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.) said. “Let’s hope for detente between the two missile camps up here.”

The Administration, during initial arms talks with the Soviets, proposed to ban mobile intercontinental missiles. If such missiles were merely limited in number, the Administration argued, compliance would be very difficult to verify as the missiles roamed the Soviet Union by rail and road.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev recently has hinted that he might accept some form of garrisoning mobile missiles in a defined region to make counting easier. So although the Administration would now like to withdraw its proposed ban, it has no assurance that if mobile missiles were permitted, Congress would vote to build U.S. missiles to offset the existing Soviet force.

U.S. officials conceded Wednesday that the dispute over mobile missiles is only one of several issues that are making it increasingly unlikely that the two sides will be able to conclude a long-range missile treaty in time for signing by President Reagan and Gorbachev at their Moscow summit late next month.

The two sides are also at loggerheads over limits on sea-launched cruise missiles, a verification regime to police the new treaty and “counting rules” for the number of warheads aboard the various weapons carried by bombers.

Also, the Administration is grappling with how to handle a recent Soviet offer to reach an agreement on space defenses.

The congressional deadlock over mobile missiles, on the eve of Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s scheduled visit to Moscow next week to discuss arms control with Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, has left Administration officials frustrated and angry.

Like the Defense Department, a Senate majority favors putting 10-warhead MX missiles on railroad cars to make them more difficult for the Soviets to strike. But a Democratic majority in the House, adamantly opposed to the MX, is pushing for construction of a new weapon--a single-warhead “Midgetman” missile to be launched from off-the-road trucks.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have been particularly outspoken on the need for a congressional decision as it designs a new force structure--balancing land-based missiles, sea-based missiles and bombers--in the event of a treaty slashing long-range nuclear missiles. U.S. and Soviet negotiators have agreed in principle to reducing each side’s arsenal by half.

Paul H. Nitze, the Administration’s chief arms control adviser, urged a Senate arms control group earlier this week to reach a common position with the House. He argued, according to one official present, that the United States would be in an awkward position if it negotiated to permit mobile missiles, only to find Congress refusing permission to build any.

Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci’s proposal for the MX would put 50 missiles with 500 warheads on rails, at a cost of $10 billion to $12 billion. The railroad cars would be based on military garrisons and “flushed,” as a crisis mounted, onto the nation’s commercial rail lines.

Critics of the program argue that up to 12 hours’ warning of a Soviet attack would be necessary to completely disperse the missiles. If the Soviets struck in a surprise attack, all might be destroyed.

The alternative 500 single-warhead Midgetman missiles would be more likely to survive a surprise attack, but they would cost an estimated $35 billion.

The dispute over space defenses is equally sticky. Last December, at the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Washington, the two sides issued a communique whose ambiguous language papered over the Soviets’ opposition to the Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as “Star Wars.”

Under that language, the two sides would work toward an agreement committing each to observe the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which forbids deployment of nationwide anti-missile systems.

At the same time, however, the two sides would be allowed to conduct “their research, development and testing as required, which are permitted by the ABM treaty.” Neither would be allowed to withdraw from the ABM treaty “for a specified period of time.”

The Soviets have proposed that those words become the foundation of an agreement to be tied into the new accord reducing long-range nuclear missiles, according to two senior Administration officials. But one of them complained that the Soviet offer would not ensure with sufficient precision that the United States could test SDI components.

“We will not be satisfied by vagueness,” this official said.

Congress would not ratify a treaty, he insisted, unless it knew precisely what the treaty language meant.