Soviet Laser Facility Seen As No Threat : U.S. Group Rejects View It Poses Danger to American Satellites

For the second year in a row, the Soviets have allowed a group of U.S. arms control enthusiasts, scientists and congressmen to tour controversial military facilities to demonstrate that these facilities are not threatening. And once again, the tours have achieved mixed results.

Last year, the Soviets invited a group assembled by the private Natural Resources Defense Council, which advocates more stringent arms control agreements, to visit two military sites. Two weeks ago, a second NRDC delegation toured three other installations.

The highlight of the latest tour was the Soviets’ old laser facility at Sary Shagan, which the Pentagon once said had “anti-satellite capabilities.”

The visit produced the expected declarations from the visiting Americans that it posed no apparent danger to U.S. satellites. But Soviet scientists acknowledged that the site had originated as a weapons project and could still have military applications. They refused to discuss or open for inspection Soviet laser research elsewhere.

As a result, the Pentagon refused to change its previous declarations, although it was clearly embarrassed by its four-year-old anti-satellite assessment.

Exposed Exaggerations

Besides aiding the Kremlin’s current peace offensive based on glasnost , the visits have exposed the Pentagon’s tendency to exaggerate Soviet threats to win public support and congressional funds for favored projects such as the “Star Wars” anti-missile program.

But they also make the point that Soviet secrecy has permitted such “worst-case” conclusions to be drawn, as the leader of the two NRDC tour groups, Dr. Thomas B. Cochran, appeared to recognize last week.

“We would not have had to visit (the facilities),” Cochran told a Soviet reporter, “if you’d put out data that we put out here. We’re an open book. If the same was true there, these site visits wouldn’t be necessary.”

The NRDC, which has long been “concerned about the problems and dangers posed by the unleashed atom,” toured five sites at the Soviets’ invitation. In 1988, the group visited the Krasnoyarsk radar station and a nuclear testing ground. This year, the Americans toured the Sary Shagan installations, a Soviet warship carrying nuclear-armed cruise missiles and a plutonium production complex.

The organizer of the tours, Dr. Yevgeny P. Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, told Cochran that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev personally had to approve the American visit to the Krasnoyarsk radar site.

All the visits produced valuable information, Cochran said in an interview.

For example, at the Soviet nuclear test range at Semipalatinsk in Central Asia, the NRDC group set off chemical explosives underground to measure how well seismic waves are propagated in the geological structure there. The intent was to show that test bans could be verified from afar without intrusive on-site inspections.

But that knowledge is not at all likely to persuade the Bush Administration or other skeptics that the U.S.-Soviet nuclear test ban agreement should be tightened. This agreement permits underground blasts of 150 kilotons (the equivalent of 150,000 tons of TNT) or less. The Soviets, like the NRDC, want the threshold lowered and eventually a total ban on tests.

In the course of the warship visit, Cochran said, the NRDC team found that nuclear warheads on naval weapons could be detected at a greater distance than predicted using “passive” instruments because of a peculiarity in Soviet weapons production techniques. A passive detector measures radiation emitted naturally by the warheads, while an “active” detector sends a beam of particles into the weapon and measures the response.

The purpose of the warship visit was to promote a U.S.-Soviet agreement limiting or banning nuclear cruise missiles on warships, something the NRDC and the Soviets support. But the U.S. government is not likely to be persuaded to accept intrusive Soviet inspection of its ships, particularly its submarines, based on the tour observations.

More remarkable were the NRDC visits to Krasnoyarsk and Sary Shagan. The twin-towered radar station at Krasnoyarsk was discovered by U.S. spy satellites in 1983, when its construction was well under way. It was similar to other Soviet radar posts that make up a missile early warning network around the nation’s periphery, except that it was about 1,000 miles inside the Soviet Union and oriented to “see” across Soviet territory.

This siting violates the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which requires radars to be on the border and facing outward. Moreover, it raised the danger that Krasnoyarsk could become the first of a series of “battle management” radars that would control an anti-missile network, not only detecting incoming warheads but ordering interceptor rockets to be launched to shoot them down.

The Pentagon said in 1985, in its booklet “Soviet Military Power,” that Krasnoyarsk was a treaty violation because of its siting and because of its “capability . . . (for) early warning and ballistic missile target tracking.”

But the NRDC team found that the distance between the sensors in the radar station permit it to be used only for early warning, not for battle management, Cochran said.

“We found that Krasnoyarsk is not a threat, although it is a violation” of the 1972 treaty, he said.

At Sary Shagan, the NRDC group was shown the laser facility that, according to the booklet “Soviet Military Power,” had “some capability to attack U.S. satellites” and could be used to test components of anti-missile weapons.

The NRDC group’s scientists, including Princeton physicist Frank von Hippel, said the facility could not generate a beam with enough power to harm a satellite.

According to news reports, Velikhov said later that the facility was “planned in the 1960s as a major space weapons development complex that would employ high-power lasers in an attempt to shoot ballistic missiles from space.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Rick Oborn, said the Defense Intelligence Agency “remains very comfortable with its estimate” of the Sary Shagan laser facility as contained in the booklet.