Helms’ Bid to Nullify INF Pact Is Blocked

After warning that he did not wish to be accused of “dilatory” tactics, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) tried Wednesday to have the U.S.-Soviet Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty ruled invalid on grounds that Mikhail S. Gorbachev was not duly authorized to sign it for the Soviet Union.

Senators promptly voted 91 to 6 to table Helms’ move, which would have ended consideration of the agreement on its first full day on the Senate floor. The action, the first test vote on the treaty, was an indication of the depth of probable support for ratification.

Backed mainly by Sen. Steve Symms (R-Ida.), Helms argued that Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and a member of the Presidium, did not have the authority “to bind the Soviet state” because he is not a member of the government but the leader of a political party.

“He is not the head of state or the foreign minister. He is not even chairman of the Council of Ministers,” Helms declared. “He is boss of the Communist Party, nothing more, nothing less.”

That being the case, he argued, there is no guarantee that the treaty, outlawing ground-launched missiles with ranges of 300 to 3,400 miles, will not be renounced anytime the Soviet Union wishes.

With Senate leaders anxious to conclude the ratification debate before President Reagan leaves for Moscow and his four-day summit meeting with Gorbachev, Helms held the floor much of the afternoon. He raised a series of parliamentary questions and points of order that at one point forced the presiding officer to send out for a copy of the agreement and all of its supporting documentation.

Helms cited a treaty from the 19th-Century Congress of Vienna as his authority for challenging Gorbachev’s authority to commit the Soviet Union to the treaty when he signed it in Washington last December.

The action, he contended, was tantamount to the United States having the INF Treaty signed by Democratic National Committee Chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr. and Republican National Committee Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr.

Brezhnev’s Role Cited

Treaty supporters, expressing some impatience, cited a list of reasons that Gorbachev is to be considered the authorized Soviet signer, even though he did not present formal credentials designating him as such, as Leonid I. Brezhnev did in signing the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Brezhnev was also party chairman at the time he signed the treaty.

Helms, who took the floor to lead the opposition to the intermediate-range missile pact Tuesday, said that he already had heard murmurs “about dilatory” tactics. Harking back to the 1978 debate over the Panama Canal treaties, which he opposed, he insisted that his moves against the new missile treaty are “deliberate.”

As the debate resumed Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) said that there is still a chance of bringing the agreement to a vote before the summit session, if senators confine themselves to consideration of serious amendments.

After Helms’ point of order was tabled Wednesday, Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and other Democrats urged that preliminary sparring end so that several major amendments can be taken up.

Earlier, Sen. Arlen K. Specter (R-Pa.) warned that the Foreign Relations Committee had opened the door to more serious difficulties than the dozen amendments planned by Helms when it attempted to spell out the Senate’s role in interpreting a treaty negotiated by the executive branch.

Specter contended that the report of the Foreign Relations panel threatens to set off a “turf battle extraordinaire” between Congress and the White House by attempting to establish Senate “primacy” in the treaty-making process.

The position taken by the committee, he declared, flies in the face of international law by injecting the Senate into agreements arrived at between two states.