Soviets Destroy 3 SS-20s With Huge Explosion

In a sun-bright cloud of fire that rose hundreds of feet into the air, the Soviet Union destroyed three intermediate-range missiles here Sunday in the major symbolic start to the elimination of its once-feared SS-20 force.

As the huge fireball showered sparks across the gray sky, the impact of the explosion rolled across the Russian steppe, jarring the observation stand about 5 miles away.

Although the missiles’ nuclear warheads had been removed long before, the explosive power of the rockets’ fuel alone left a crater more than 65 feet deep and 130 feet in diameter.

3-Year Program

The missiles were the first group of SS-20s to be destroyed under terms of the Soviet-American agreement, ratified in May, that will remove ground-launched intermediate-range missiles entirely from the superpowers’ arsenals over the next three years.

“These weapons are being destroyed not because they themselves are obsolete,” Lt. Gen. Nikolai V. Mazyarkin, commander of the Kapustin Yar missile facility, told diplomats, peace activists and journalists gathered to observe the destruction, “but because the political thinking that brought ever-increasing nuclear confrontation is obsolete.”

Other Soviet officials expressed Moscow’s hope that the implementation of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, itself a landmark in arms control negotiations, will create sufficient confidence to bring further agreements on disarmament, including the proposed 50% reduction in the strategic nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers.

“This is a small step, but an important step, toward the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons by the year 2000,” Gennady I. Gerasimov, the Foreign Ministry’s chief spokesman, said after the missiles had been destroyed. “This is not an impossible goal--the 50% reduction is within reach, given a bit more imagination, flexibility and good will.”

Under terms of the current agreement, which covers ground-launched missiles with ranges of 300 to 3,400 miles, the Soviet Union will destroy 826 intermediate-range missiles, 470 of which had been deployed and operational, and the United States will destroy 689 missiles, 429 of which had been deployed. In addition, the Soviet Union will destroy 926 shorter-range missiles within the intermediate-range category and the United States 170.

U.S. Inspectors Tight-Lipped

Tight-lipped American inspectors, dressed in bright blue nylon jackets, watched the demolition. But apparently upset by the 10 busloads of diplomats, peace activists and journalists brought to Kapustin Yar, about 125 miles southeast of Volgograd, they brusquely refused to make any comment.

“We are not allowed to explain what we are doing,” one said. “If you want to know, ask Washington.”

The nuclear warheads had been removed from the three long, cigar-shaped missiles, which normally weigh 43 tons, at other Soviet bases, according to Col. Oleg Medvedev, the technical officer in charge of the destruction. They had been rendered inoperative by cutting off the ends of the missiles and were removed from their launchers.

At Kapustin Yar, a Soviet missile facility for 40 years, they were placed in a remote area and packed with nearly a ton of high explosives that, along with their own solid propellant fuel, ensured their total demolition.

Twice a month for three years, the exercise will be repeated until the SS-20s are eliminated from the Soviet arsenal. Other missiles, again minus their warheads, are being destroyed in space after being launched from bases in the Soviet Far East. The first SS-20 to be blown up was destroyed in a test explosion here last month.

The missile launchers and transport vehicles are being turned into commercial cranes in cooperation with a West German company, according to Soviet officials.

The missiles’ warheads will be “used in the national economy or disarmed in the normal way,” the officials added. They declined to give further details on the warheads’ future use, though they noted that nuclear charges are frequently used here in major construction projects.

The deployment of the Soviet SS-20s, starting in the late 1970s, and the counterdeployment of the U.S. Pershing 2 missiles had brought the threat of nuclear war terrifyingly close to many places in Europe--and later in Asia--that had considered themselves too small to be targets in a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers.

By 1987, however, the Soviet Union had deployed 243 intermediate-range missiles, mostly SS-20s, in the European part of this country--and 162 more in Asia, targeted on Japan, China and probably South Korea. It also deployed shorter-range missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

After much controversy, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in response, deployed American missiles in Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy and West Germany and stockpiled more in the United States.

Prolonged negotiations, initially aimed at setting limits on such deployments, led to the agreement signed in Washington last December at a meeting between President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, to eliminate the entire class of weapons. After debate both in the United States and here, the agreement was ratified in May.

The Soviet decision to deploy the SS-20 is now regarded in Moscow as a serious political mistake because it led to a sharp deterioration in relations with Western Europe, confirming to many there the seriousness of the “Soviet threat” that Moscow had worked a decade to dispel and thus strengthened NATO.

The Soviet Union, moreover, found itself even deeper in an arms race that it believes it cannot win--the West’s technological lead is great and probably growing and the Soviet economy with that of its Warsaw Pact partners is only a third the size of that of NATO.