Soviets Head Home After Viewing Missile Facilities

Teams of Soviet inspectors left for home Tuesday after inspecting five U.S. missile facilities to verify compliance with the recent U.S.-Soviet Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

The 48 weapons experts and linguists boarded their Aeroflot jetliner one day after conducting 24-hour spot checks at missile plants in California, Arizona, Colorado and Utah, said Capt. Tom Dolney, a spokesman at Travis.

They returned to the base late Sunday and early Monday in time for a Fourth of July air and fireworks show. “They couldn’t help but see it,” Dolney said.

“They rested up when they got here because they went pretty hard during their inspections,” he said. “There was so much to do and so little time to do it in.”

The inspectors conducted the first of five types of inspections allowed under the INF treaty signed by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in December.

The “base line inspection” is designed to verify the exact number of medium-range missiles and related components to be destroyed under the treaty.

“It’s basically to count and record,” said Lt. Col. Joseph Wagovich of the Defense Department’s new On-Site Inspection Agency.

Another 22 inspectors who arrived with the five teams will remain up to 13 years at the Hercules Aerospace Co. missile plant in Magna, Utah, to monitor the gates of the facility where Pershing missile rocket motors were made.

The Soviets had arrived Friday as 20 American inspectors departed for Moscow and the Soviet city of Votkinsk for reciprocal inspections.

Armed with tape measures, scales and Polaroid cameras, the Soviets visited five sites: a General Dynamics plant in San Diego; the Pueblo Army Depot Activity in Pueblo, Colo.; the Dugway Proving Ground, a remote Army installation in the western Utah desert; a cruise missile testing and training site at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., about 60 miles south of Tucson, and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, a missile training center.

Under the complex provisions of the treaty, the Soviets had the right to conduct spot checks at any of the five sites this weekend, and they didn’t have to say how many of them they wanted to visit until the last minute.