E. Germany Admits It Has Missiles Banned by Treaty

Dealing a potentially serious blow to confidence in U.S.-Soviet arms pacts, East Germany acknowledged Wednesday that it has 24 previously undeclared Soviet-made missiles that were banned by the 1987 medium-range missile treaty.

The East German government said that it will destroy the SS-23 missiles, which are capable of carrying nuclear warheads but apparently were equipped with conventional explosives or other non-nuclear devices. It said two launch platforms were destroyed last month.

The Bush Administration, which discovered evidence of SS-23 components in East Germany last week, has asked Moscow to explain how the Soviet-made missiles got there and why they were not disclosed when information was exchanged on missiles covered by the 1987 accord.

The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty called for elimination from superpower arsenals of all missiles with ranges from 300 to 3,400 miles. The SS-23 missiles have a range of 550 miles.

The East German SS-23s may not constitute a violation of the treaty, however, if ownership of the weapons was transferred from the Soviet Union before the pact took effect, because the agreement technically covers only U.S. and Soviet weapons.

Even so, the existence of the undeclared SS-23s will be viewed as an act of bad faith on the part of the Soviets, who demanded during negotiations of the 1987 accord the elimination of U.S.-made Pershing 1 missiles that had been purchased by West Germany.

“I can’t say they (the SS-23s) are illegal,” Ronald F. Lehman, director of the U.S. arms control agency, told a Senate committee Wednesday. “But we didn’t know they were there, so they were covert.”

Lehman said it was “premature” to speculate on the impact of the disclosure on the strategic arms treaty expected to be completed this year. The far-reaching U.S.-Soviet accord calls for cuts of 30% to 50% in long-range offensive nuclear warheads and bombs held by each superpower.

“The Soviets are going to look bad on this, even conniving,” predicted a senior U.S. official. “Why didn’t they come back to us on this earlier and say the East Germans had these weapons, particularly after they made such a fuss over the West Germans’ Pershings during the negotiations?”

During the INF Treaty negotiations, Moscow demanded that the Pershing 1 missiles be dismantled because they fell within the banned missile range. The United States argued that it did not own the weapons, but West Germany unilaterally declared that it would destroy all 70 Pershing 1 missiles in its arsenal to resolve the impasse.

In 1984 and 1985, the Soviet Union moved a number of SS-23s from its territory into Czechoslovakia and East Germany in an effort to intimidate Western Europe. Moscow had broken off arms talks and wanted the Continent to reject deployment of U.S. Pershing 2 missiles.

At some point, ownership of the SS-23s stationed in East Germany apparently was transferred to the government in East Berlin during the hard-line regime of former East German Communist Party leader Erich Honecker, who resigned in disgrace late last year.

The Soviets never announced that they had transferred possession of the missiles to either country. The fate of the SS-23s in Czechoslovakia is unclear.

The disclosure of the hidden missiles raises questions about the effectiveness of U.S. surveillance efforts, which rely primarily on satellites to detect undeclared missiles.

The presence of the East German SS-23s was reported in a German newspaper last week. U.S. spy satellites then found “a couple (of) items associated with the SS-23 system, a launcher and a transporter, maybe a canister (in which a missile would be carried), but no missiles as such,” one source said.

In making the disclosure, the reformist Communist government of East Germany said that it had begun the process of destroying the missiles and their launchers in February on the orders of new Prime Minister Hans Modrow.

East German Defense Ministry spokesman Uwe Hempel told the East German ADN news agency that two launch ramps already had been destroyed.

The entire SS-23 system in East Germany had consisted of four launch ramps, four transporters, 24 rockets equipped with non-nuclear warheads and technical infrastructure such as repair and maintenance facilities, Hempel said.

“The destruction of the entire weapons system will be completed in November, 1990,” Hempel said, according to an Agence France-Press report from East Berlin.

East Germany reported that the SS-23s were equipped with non-nuclear warheads, but it did not provide details.