Missiles: INF Faces a Final Hurdle

The intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed in December would eliminate 1,752 Soviet and 867 American nuclear missiles, but it would not make the world a safer place, according to one vocal critic. The treaty does not require either superpower to dismantle warheads, “the part of the nuclear weapon that kills people and destroys property,” he argues. Because these warheads might be retargeted at the U.S., he says, the treaty constitutes a “trigger for nuclear holocaust.”

Who is this champion of disarmament? Jesse Jackson? No, Jesse Helms, the right-wing Senator from North Carolina and the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which opened hearings on the treaty last week. Never mind that top Administration officials, from Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci to Treaty Negotiators Max Kampelman and Maynard Glitman, explained that INF warheads will be preserved at U.S. insistence, to guard against a shortage of fissionable material and shield sensitive technology from Soviet inspectors. Helms was willing to try any tactic, including sounding like a liberal, to slow ratification of the popular treaty.

No more than a dozen Senators are against the INF agreement, and not even the hard-line conservatives believe they can kill it outright. But the treaty is under review by three committees — Foreign Relations, Armed Services and Intelligence — and a simple majority of Senators can add “killer” amendments that could force renegotiation. To forestall this, Secretary of State George Shultz, Carlucci, former Secretaries of State William Rogers and Cyrus Vance, military leaders and present and past experts on arms negotiations trooped from hearing room to hearing room beseeching Senators not to tamper with the product of eight years of effort. Said Rogers: “I can’t think of a more serious setback to American foreign policy and to American interests throughout the world than to have this treaty fail.”

This impressive unity seemed to be working. Few Senators want to be responsible for killing the first treaty to wipe out a whole category of missiles. Instead, they are using the hearings to influence other concerns. Among them:

— Future negotiations, particularly the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, aimed at achieving a 50% reduction in long-range missiles. “This debate is really a dress rehearsal for START,” says a Republican Senator. Conservatives want to create a “paper trail” that could bolster their case against a new treaty, especially concerning the need for tougher verification procedures. As the hearings opened, Helms handed Shultz a classified document that he said showed the U.S. had been misled on the number of Soviet intermediate-range missiles. “The Soviets have a plan to cheat and are cheating,” declared Helms.

Administration witnesses also have an eye toward START. The INF treaty breaks new ground on verification procedures, including an agreement to allow up to 20 surprise inspections annually for three years. So too with “asymmetrical reductions,” which require the Soviets to get rid of twice as many missiles as the U.S. This principle, Carlucci suggested, could be applied to the Soviets’ much larger inventory of strategic weapons.

— Conventional forces. Republican Larry Pressler of South Dakota suggested that before the INF treaty is approved, conventional forces in Europe be brought to “parity,” an undertaking he claimed could be achieved “in a matter of weeks.” Shultz reminded him that 23 nations and two alliances have not settled that issue during 14 years of talks. Admiral William Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also undermined the conservatives’ argument, saying the Joint Chiefs have concluded that “this treaty is militarily sufficient and adequately verifiable ((and)) has no impact on NATO’s fundamental strategy.”

— Senate prerogatives. The Administration has claimed that the classified negotiating record of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty permits it to reinterpret the limits that were ratified by the Senate on testing space weapons. To prevent a similar dispute in the future, Democrat Joseph Biden of Delaware had Shultz present a detailed history of the INF negotiations.

In the Armed Services Committee, Chairman Sam Nunn of Georgia went further: he invited the Soviet Union to speak out if it disagrees with the Administration’s presentation. “If the Soviets remain silent on points of interpretation presented by the Executive Branch,” said Nunn, “then I believe that the Senate . . . can reasonably believe and contend that that silence connotes assent.”

Any Senate reservations about the INF agreement are likely to be outweighed by the dire consequences of rejection. Speaking Friday, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a prominent conservative and former U.S. Representative to the U.N., admitted that she has doubts about aspects of the treaty. But failure to proceed at this point, said Kirkpatrick, would aggravate a deeper problem: fears in Europe that the U.S. has become essentially ungovernable. For the Senate, more is at stake than the treaty on the table.