Way Clear for Final Senate Debate on INF Pact

With strong Administration assurances that potential loopholes have been eliminated, Senate leaders agreed Monday night to begin final debate on the U.S.-Soviet treaty banning land-based intermediate-range nuclear weapons.

“I am satisfied, and I want to proceed,” Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) said Monday night after receiving written recommendations from the Foreign Relations, Armed Services and Intelligence committees to go ahead.

Although the pact, signed last December, is considered certain to be approved, there was a question whether the Senate debate could be wound up in time for President Reagan to exchange ratification documents with Mikhail S. Gorbachev at the forthcoming summit meeting in Moscow.

Byrd said the Senate schedule will be cleared and that full attention will be turned to the ratification debate until it is completed, unless the agenda is unavoidably changed.

The delayed decision to send the pact to the Senate floor was made after Secretary of State George P. Shultz and arms negotiators Max M. Kampelman and Maynard W. Glitman spent several hours going over details worked out in meetings with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze last week in Geneva.

Dispute Over Procedure

A dispute over the procedures to be used by U.S. inspectors to verify Soviet compliance with the treaty arose just as the full Senate was about to take up the agreement and occupied most of Shultz’s and Shevardnadze’s time in their last meeting in preparation for the summit session.

Byrd reiterated his view that the Senate will not be bound by the summit deadline but said he would be happy to see the debate concluded before the President’s departure. “We are going to do everything we can,” he said, “to see that the matter is expedited.”

Despite the heavy support for the treaty, it faces a raft of amendments not only from opponents such as Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) but from some supporters as well.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), a staunch supporter of the pact, said that he plans to offer an amendment to make it unmistakeably clear that “futuristic weapons” in the intermediate range are covered by the treaty.

Confusion on that point, in addition to the dispute over verification, brought about the delay in getting the agreement to the Senate floor after it was approved, 17 to 2, by the Foreign Relations Committee.

Appearing before the Foreign Relations Committee to argue his case for the treaty for the third time since its signing, Shultz told senators that U.S.-Soviet negotiations are continuing on the administrative details of verification procedures.

But he said that, as a result of his latest arms control talks in Geneva, “we and the Soviets not only agree on the rights and obligations established in this treaty, but also on procedures to carry them out.”

“There is no such thing as absolute, 100% verification,” Shultz said. “But it is our judgment that this treaty, through its successive layers of procedures, contains the measures needed for effective verification.”

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) agreed that the Shultz talks with Shevardnadze had “straightened out a number of areas.” As a result, he added, “I hope we are ready to go at full speed and complete our job in the next seven to 10 days.”

Reagan is scheduled to leave Washington on May 25, flying to Helsinki, where he will rest for three days and prepare for his talks with the Soviet leader. His fourth series of meetings with Gorbachev opens in Moscow on May 29.

Hope for 2nd Accord

At the time the INF treaty was signed last December, the Administration hoped to have a second U.S.-Soviet arms treaty--mandating deep reductions in long-range, or strategic, missile arsenals--ready for signing at the Moscow summit.

Negotiations on that far-reaching accord have dragged. With a new treaty signing out of the question, the White House wants to take the completed medium-range missile agreement to the summit meeting so that Reagan and Gorbachev can exchange the instruments of ratification.

Glitman said Monday that the United States expects to have its inspection teams ready to begin monitoring the Soviets’ SS-20 missile production site 30 days after the treaty goes into effect.

Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak charged Monday that the Soviets may already have violated the new accord, saying that U.S. intelligence has photographs of their SS-19 sea-based missile being test-fired from the Nenoska test site near Murmansk.

The treaty bans ground-based missiles with ranges from 300 to 3,400 miles and provides that missiles tested within that range be considered banned.

The Soviets’ mobile SS-20 missile was the main subject of discussions by Shultz and Shevardnadze in Geneva on treaty verification.

Disagreement had arisen over the United States’ rights to inspect canisters in which SS-20 and SS-21 missiles are shipped from Soviet production facilities, raising the possibility that the banned SS-20s could be smuggled out in canisters designed for the SS-21 ICBM.

The Geneva talks produced agreement that U.S. inspectors may X-ray the larger SS-21 containers to ensure that they do not contain SS-20s.