Questions About Soviet Cheating

By Strobe Talbott

Future talks could hinge on compliance with old treaties

Does the Soviet Union cheat on the agreements that Leonid Brezhnev signed with Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the 1970s? Should the Reagan Administration feel bound by those agreements?

Those questions, and their answers, are closely linked, and President Reagan must face up to them squarely--and very soon. By the end of this week, the White House is required, under a Pentagon authorization bill, to give the Senate Armed Services Committee a report on Soviet compliance with past agreements. By early next year, the Administration must decide on the second question, whether the U.S. should continue to abide by the old SALT agreements while it seeks to negotiate new treaties in the talks that Secretary of State George Shultz plans to propose to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in January.

As on most other arms-control issues, the Administration is sharply divided over what these reports should say. Hardliners, whose most determined and skillful representative is Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, are pressing for the most damning, categorical interpretation of any available evidence that the Soviets have flagrantly violated SALT. Their charges of Soviet cheating buttress their broader case that arms control, at least as practiced traditionally, is not in the national interest. Moderates, centered at the State Department, are inclined to a more equivocal--and, they believe, a more subtle and accurate--reading of the Soviet record. They tend to avoid stark references to violations and talk instead about "questionable activities." The State Department, according to one of its officials, "has been seeking a report that raises tough questions without overstating the answers."

Shultz and his advisers have an ulterior motive. They want to protect the President's diplomatic options. Reagan has said repeatedly that he hopes to reach an arms-control agreement with the U.S.S.R. in his second term. But if his Administration officially renders a guilty verdict against the U.S.S.R. on the issue of compliance, the prospects for the Shultz-Gromyko meeting and future negotiations and agreements may be bleaker than ever. The Soviets will take the accusations as proof that the U.S. is looking for a pretext to scuttle arms control once and for all, while making the Soviets take the blame. At the same time, Congress and public opinion will be extremely skeptical about the wisdom of continuing to do any business with convicted cheaters.

Caught in the middle of the intramural debate is the intelligence community. Its photoreconnaissance specialists and weapons analysts are the gumshoes who stake out the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. But these detectives are concerned about protecting their "sources and methods" as well as catching the crooks. The CIA is anxious that the Pentagon hardliners, in their zeal to prosecute the Soviets in public, will give away sensitive intelligence secrets about how much the U.S. knows and how it knows it. Some intelligence experts also interpret the data about Soviet activities as being more ambiguous than the hard-liners want to assert.

As chairman of an interagency review process, the President's National Security Adviser, Robert McFarlane, has had the difficult task of trying to hammer out a consensus on Soviet compliance that will balance these conflicting bureaucratic interests and be responsive to the Senate while not undercutting the President's stated desire to resume serious arms-control negotiations with the U.S.S.R. next year. The process, according to a participant, has been "a knockdown, drag-out, blood-on-the-floor free-for-all."

There is plenty of room for honest disagreement on the issue of Soviet compliance. Judgments depend on close calls over esoteric technical matters and fine points in treaty language. The whole problem has been complicated by the deterioration of political relations between the superpowers, the stagnation of the arms-control process and the onrush of technology. New weapons systems tend not to fit neatly into the definitions and stipulations drafted as long as twelve years ago. Says Michael Krepon, an expert on compliance issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "The Soviets usually exploit ambiguities in treaties, and arms-control critics immediately label these Soviet practices as violations."

Since 1972, the U.S. and the Soviet Union have been exchanging private complaints about whether their military programs comply with SALT. They have been doing so behind closed doors in Geneva, in a joint Soviet-American body called the Standing Consultative Commission. Before Reagan came into office, the U.S. had taken many challenges of Soviet practices to the SCC; the Soviets either adequately explained them or discontinued them. Recently, however, the Soviets have been playing closer to the edge of what is permissible, and have perhaps stepped over that edge. Two examples are particularly disturbing, and they are Exhibits A and B in the hardliners' case:

The Krasnoyarsk Radar. Under the SALT I treaty of 1972, neither side is allowed to develop a nationwide system of antiballistic-missile defenses. The reason for this rule is that mutual deterrence rests, rather perversely, on the principle of mutual vulnerability: if each superpower knows the other has the ability to retaliate against a first strike, neither will launch such a strike.

By 1983, American spy satellites had spotted a huge construction project near Krasnoyarsk in central Siberia. It looks suspiciously like a giant radar station that would be useful for providing early warning against a missile attack and could also help shoot down the incoming warheads with ABMS. Its location deep inside the U.S.S.R. would make it a clear-cut violation of SALT if it is used for early warning, since the ABM treaty says that such facilities must be near the periphery of the country.

The Soviets claim that the radar, which will not be completed until 1988 or 1989, is not for looking outward toward the Pacific Ocean for enemy missile warheads, but for looking upward to track satellites and manned vehicles in space, a function permitted by SALT. Whenever the U.S. presses them on the Krasnoyarsk radar, the Soviets say two new early-warning radars that the U.S. is building in Texas and Georgia violate SALT because their wide sweep covers much of the continental U.S. and therefore could be part of a nationwide defensive net. The Soviets' countercharge is weak because the new American radars are on the periphery of the U.S., as the treaty requires.

New Missiles. The SALT II treaty of 1979 permits each side one new type of intercontinental ballistic missile. The U.S. has chosen as its new type the MX, a ten-warhead successor to the three-warhead Minuteman III, although the MX program has been the object of intense controversy and may be killed by the Congress. The Soviets are developing a roughly comparable rocket called the SS-24, and they have officially notified the U.S. that this is to be their one new type.

But the Soviets are working on another ICBM. It is smaller than the SS-24 and may be armed with only one warhead. They claim it is a "modernization" of an old 1960s-vintage ICBM, the SS-13. The U.S. intelligence community has been monitoring the testing program and is convinced that there are too many improvements for the rocket to qualify as a modernization. It is, say U.S. experts, definitely a second new type, which they have dubbed the SS-25. But the definition of a new type in SALT II is imprecise, and some analysts think the Soviet rocket may fit through a loophole that allows a second new type as long as it is sufficiently similar in size and other characteristics to an existing ICBM.

A Soviet diplomat in Washington recently argued that the U.S. is in no position to be a stickler on this issue, since the Administration and Congress are talking about developing a second new type of ICBM: the small, mobile, single-warhead Midgetman.

"It is important to separate the real compliance issues from the red herrings," says Thomas Longstreth of the Arms Control Association, a private educational group in Washington. "The Krasnoyarsk radar and SS-25 are real issues. I don't think there is any doubt that the Soviets are playing hardball with us, showing us what they can do if arms control breaks down completely. By some of their actions, they are saying, in some crude way, 'If it's an arms race you want, it's an arms race you're going to get.' "

Kenneth Adelman, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, believes that the U.S. must press charges against the Soviets if there is to be any progress in arms control. "There's no question," he says, "the Soviets are violating commitments they have undertaken. Their violations are to various degrees and in various areas. To be serious about arms control, we have to be serious about compliance. When one side abides by its commitments but the other side doesn't, then what's really happening is unilateral disarmament by the first side, under the guise of arms control."

The Administration has been at odds with itself over compliance since its first days in office. In his initial press conference as President, on Jan. 29, 1981, Reagan said the Soviets "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat." Among the newly appointed officials who took that statement very literally was David Sullivan, a former CIA analyst who had made a career of documenting alleged Soviet violations of SALT. He served briefly in the ACDA in the State Department building.

Sullivan was an ally of Perle's in the bureaucratic struggle, but he was on the wrong side of the Potomac. He ran afoul of colleagues in ACDA and State when he tried to get the Administration to sanction what one official recalls as "a laundry list of every Soviet misdeed since the birth of Lenin, all of them branded as arms-control violations." He was fired from ACDA in. March 1981 but has remained an active, though largely invisible, protagonist in the battle over arms control as an adviser to three conservative Republican Senators: James McClure and Steven Symms of Idaho and Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

Last January, largely in response to pressure from that group, the Administration issued a report on Soviet compliance. It detailed seven Soviet "violations and probable violations" but cautioned that in three of the seven cases the evidence was inconclusive.

A variety of outside experts challenged those findings, arguing that the evidence was less than conclusive in all seven cases. But the hard-liners felt that the Administration had let the Soviets off easy. Perle stressed at the time that the report was "illustrative only," suggesting that there were many more charges to come. Sullivan told TIME last week, "We were pleased that for the first time a President formally charged the Soviets with violating a strategic-arms treaty, but we thought the report could have been stronger."

In October, the trio of right-wing Senators engineered the release of a much more hard-hitting report prepared not by the Administration but by a panel of outsiders--the President's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament (GAC), composed of private citizens, most of whom are hawks and arms-control skeptics. Their study, based heavily on data gathered and interpreted by Sullivan, found the Soviets guilty of 17 "material breaches" of nine treaties and four international commitments. The GAC also cited ten "suspected violations."

Reagan had sat on the GAC report for ten months. When he finally forwarded it to Capitol Hill in October, he stopped short of endorsing its conclusions. He said in a covering letter that the report had been neither reviewed nor approved by the Government. "The GAC report was a hot potato," recalls a White House official. "We couldn't embrace the thing even if we believed it, because to do so would be the kiss of death for arms control, to which the President is really committed. How can we continue trying to negotiate with the Soviets if everything that the GAC report says was true?"

That, in a nutshell, is a dilemma the Administration still faces. The report due this week is a congressionally mandated update on the one the Administration released in January. Sullivan last week warned that his patrons would not be pleased if McFarlane tried to delay the new study or "distance the President from it the way he did with the GAC report. We expect a larger menu of SALT violations than we got in January. We hope not to see a report that is watered down and full of divided opinion."

Congress requires another report from the Administration in February on the related issue of whether the U.S. should continue to comply with SALT while it tries to negotiate better agreements. There, too, opinion is divided. The hard-liners would like to see SALT dead and buried, while the State Department and its allies argue that the U.S. will be worse off, both diplomatically and militarily, if it pulls the plug on the treaty.

Both superpowers are hedging their bets by proceeding with new military programs that will confront them with stark choices about whether to maintain even the pretense of compliance. The U.S. is facing that dilemma almost immediately. The nuclear-powered submarine U.S.S. Alaska is due to be launched by the Electric Boat Division of the General Dynamics Corp. in Groton, Conn., next month; it will begin sea trials in the fall. With that boat in service, the U.S. may, for the first time, be definitively and deliberately in violation of SALT.

Among the ceilings established by SALT II is a limit of 1,200 launchers for long-range ballistic missiles with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MlRVs). The Alaska's 24 Trident rockets, each with eight thermonuclear warheads, would put the American total of MlRVed ballistic-missile launchers at 1,214.

To avoid violating SALT II, the U.S. would have to take out of service one of its 31 older, smaller Poseidon submarines or remove some land-based Minuteman III ICBMs. In the past, as new U.S. weapons have been deployed, older ones have been dismantled or converted to other uses. For example, the five-year SALT I agreement on offensive weapons, which Nixon signed in 1972, limits the number of submarine tubes each side can have. During the 1970s, as the U.S. Navy built Poseidons, it would dismantle their predecessors and display the pieces on docks so that Soviet spy satellites could see proof that the U.S. was staying within the SALT I limits. This practice continued even after SALT I expired in 1977. The Soviets have done much the same.

Compliance with SALTII is a trickier matter for the Reagan Administration. The Senate never ratified the treaty, and even if it had done so, the pact would expire at the end of next year. Reagan campaigned against SALT II as "fatally flawed." Throughout his first term, informal observance of the expired SALT I agreement on offensive weapons and the unratified SALTII treaty was explained as an "interim restraint," a stopgap that would give the U.S. a chance to negotiate new agreements and to head off what military planners call "breakout." That is what happens when one side unilaterally declares itself no longer bound by arms control and suddenly fields large numbers of new, threatening and hitherto prohibited weapons.

In 1982 Reagan hoped to improve on SALT in what he called the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. But after 18 months of mutual stonewalling in Geneva, those negotiations collapsed a year ago when the Soviets went home and refused to set a date for resumption. With START stalled, the interim restraint has turned out to be open-ended, and it may have to last for a long time to come--well beyond the expiration of SALT II--if arms control is to survive. Some hard-liners seem to be hoping that a tough compliance report this week will set the scene for an Administration recommendation in February not to abide by SALT.

There is good reason to worry about what will happen to the military balance if that view prevails. The Soviets have shown a menacing eagerness to accelerate the buildup of their own arsenal when the arms-control process breaks down. Since leaving START, they have deployed new long-range and intermediate-range weapons against the U.S. and its allies. Whether those deployments prove irreversible or whether they turn out to be bargaining chips that might be traded away in future negotiations, they have complicated the prospects for arms control.

Also, the Soviet Union, like the U.S., is bumping its head against an important SALT II ceiling. Each side is allowed under the treaty 820 launchers for ICBMs with MIRVs. The Soviets have 818. Their new ten-warhead SS-24 may be ready for deployment next year. There is concern among American planners over whether the Soviets will put the SS-24 in existing underground silos, replacing the older ones already there, as SALT II requires, or whether they will keep all their old rockets and build new launchers for the new missiles. They could also deploy their other new missile, the smaller SS-25, by building new launchers for it rather than retiring older missiles. They would be doing so in defiance of SALT but gaining a major military advantage in the process. These would be classic cases of breakout. The Congressional Research Service, which supplies members of Congress with background reports and analysis on policy, has estimated that with SALT still in force, formally or otherwise, the Soviets would have increased their strategic weapons from about 10,000 today to about 14,000 by 1994 while without SALT they could have about 30,000. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the breakout figure would be closer to 40,000.

Soviet decisions could depend in part on American ones. The U.S. is continuing with a number of military programs that the Soviets regard as extremely threatening. One is the Trident submarine program, of which the Alaska is the seventh boat in an open-ended series. Another is the President's Star Wars plan for a space-based system to defend the U.S. against a Soviet nuclear attack. The Administration has said that it will accelerate its research on Star Wars in a way that does not contravene the 1972 ABM treaty, which is the only strategic arms-control agreement still formally in force. But that treaty prohibits the development as well as the testing and deployment of space-based defenses. The chief Soviet negotiator in START, Viktor Karpov, complained to his American counterpart, Edward Rowny, last year that the very announcement of the Star Wars program was a violation of the spirit of the ABM treaty.

The Soviets have a vigorous ABM research program of their own, including work on technologies like laser beams. Their radar at Krasnoyarsk could very well turn out to be part of an ABM network. They are poised on the starting line -- and perhaps ready to jump the gun -- if the U.S. seems committed to a space race.

That is just what worries many critics of Star Wars: the quest for an impenetrable defense will provoke the Soviets into adding offensive weapons while at the same time trying to develop extensive defenses of their own.

Thus the arms race and the attempt to regulate it are at a turning point. In 1985 either the superpowers will continue to observe SALT as they negotiate toward something better, or the combination of military pressures and political ill feeling will bring the already shaky arms-control edifice crashing down. The choice could be between a continuation of interim restraints and a massive case of breakout on both sides.

-- By Strobe Talbott