Despite Kremlin, Latvia Blasting Radar Facility : Military: Riga regards U.S.-funded demolition as ‘purely political.’ Moscow had pressed for conversion of the Soviet base.

In a U.S.-bankrolled blast at the Cold War’s legacy, Latvia plans to blow up a 19-story Soviet military facility today in a ceremony likely also to deepen the crater in the Baltic nation’s relations with Russia.

With thousands of dignitaries, diplomats and the simply curious watching, an American demolition team will reduce a planned Soviet antiballistic missile site in Skrunda to an unpleasant memory and a pile of rubble.

Russian objections to destruction of the unfinished, unoccupied Large, Phased-Array Radar (LPAR) base have been indirect and obscure, such as a proposal by scientists that the facility be converted into an international center to protect Earth from wayward space objects.

But Moscow’s frequent, if sometimes far-fetched, appeals for preserving the Skrunda facility have made it clear there will be consequences for already strained ties with Riga.

And the more Russians have grumbled about Latvia’s destructive designs on the complex it inherited after the Soviet Union’s breakup, the more determined the newly independent country’s leaders have been to erase what they see as a monument to the era of Soviet occupation.

“Our position is firm and can’t be changed. This building must be pulled down,” Latvian Foreign Ministry spokesman Rihards Mucins said in a telephone interview from Riga.

He said his government was aware of “all sorts of different fantasies originating inside Russian scientific and military circles” for converting the facility to an observatory, a museum or even a restaurant. But Latvia has rejected alternatives to destruction “because we realized this building can also be converted back from a restaurant or museum into a military site at any moment,” Mucins said.

Like their neighbors in Lithuania and Estonia, Latvians accuse the Kremlin of harboring notions of someday reasserting rule over the Baltic states it enslaved for half a century. “For us, the Skrunda issue is a purely political one,” Mucins said. “This is more of a political declaration of Latvia’s peaceful intentions.”

That view has won both political and financial backing from the U.S. government, which is footing the $7-million bill for demolition under the Defense Department’s “Project Peace” program for easing security risks bequeathed by the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

“Politics and symbolism are elements of security, and it’s very difficult to separate them in a case like this,” a U.S. official said, defending the demolition. “For Latvians, this 19-story building rising out of their rich farmland has been an important symbol of the Soviet military presence.”

Russian authorities ceded the Skrunda site, about 80 miles southwest of Riga, to Latvia last year in negotiations over the withdrawal of Russian troops.

In a letter to the Latvian government Monday, a group of Russian scientists asked that the facility be preserved and transformed into “an international system to detect dangerous space objects and protect the planet from collision with them.”

On Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry had warned that the explosion could impair the functioning of a nearby radar station run by the Russian government under an agreement that extends until 1998.

Russia’s ambassador to Latvia, Alexander Rannikh, told journalists in Riga on Wednesday that he had received assurances there would be no disruption of the Russian radar system.