U.S. Praises Soviets for Better Arms Compliance

The Soviet Union has taken “significant action” in the past year to improve its compliance with arms-control agreements, the Bush Administration said Friday in releasing an annual report on arms-control violations.

Some “serious concerns about noncompliance remain,” the report stated, but in nearly all cases the Soviet Union has taken steps to reduce U.S. objections. Moreover, the report said, “the institutionalization of a more accountable Soviet government” may provide a lasting foundation for future arms-control agreements.

In the five years since the government began issuing annual score cards on Soviet arms-control behavior, the reports often have served as a showcase for U.S. complaints. The mild--at times complimentary--tone of the new report is another indication of how much U.S.-Soviet relations have improved in the last year.

The report, issued Friday, is a 17-page, unclassified summary of a more detailed classified study that the Administration submitted to Congress. The bulk of the paper deals with alleged violations of the Anti-Ballistic Missile and Intermediate Nuclear Forces pacts.

Last fall, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze publicly admitted that a Soviet radar installation at Krasnoyarsk was a clear violation of the ABM treaty, conceding a point that U.S. officials had argued for several years. Shevardnadze’s admission was a welcome step that removed a major block in the way of future arms-control agreements, President Bush said in a letter to Congress introducing the report.

“It was the persistence and consistently strong U.S. stance against violations” that brought about the Soviet change in position, Bush wrote. He added: “We must remember that it was not by shying away from the fact of a violation that we have moved toward its positive resolution.”

The Soviets have not yet dismantled the Krasnoyarsk radar, as they have committed themselves to doing, but preliminary steps toward taking the installation down may have begun, according to the report.

As for the INF treaty, progress continues toward the treaty’s aim: the destruction by both superpowers of thousands of nuclear missiles based in Europe. As of December, the Soviets had destroyed more than 1,400 missiles and had fewer than 400 left to eliminate before the treaty deadline, still about 15 months away.

During the year, U.S. officials warned the Soviets about several matters that appeared to be violations of technical provisions of the treaty. In all cases, however, the Soviets appear to have taken steps to eliminate the problems. Although the report does not say so, Administration officials said the Soviets also had complained about technical violations of the treaty by the U.S. side.

The Soviets continue to maintain laboratories and other facilities for chemical and biological warfare in violation of a 1972 treaty on biological weapons.

In the past, the United States has charged them with using germ warfare in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Laos. Neutral observers have challenged those U.S. charges, saying the evidence behind them is faulty. In any case, the current report says, there has been no confirmed evidence of any new violations in the last six years.

The two countries are now working on an agreement that would ban chemical warfare, a goal that Bush has said he hopes to accomplish by the end of the year.

So far, the two sides have agreed to exchange data on the types and amounts of chemicals in their arsenals.