A layman's guide to fixing the INF treaty.

A LAYMAN'S GUIDE TO FIXING THE INF TREATY

As the Senate winds up its debate over the INF treaty, there is one great question yet to be answered: will the Senate actually deliberate on the terms of the accord, or merely turn itself into a rubber stamp? The conventional wisdom holds that senators will fold before the Reagan Administration's take-it-or-leave-it stance. Until recently, this had been a politically viable position--because the only people advocating amendements to the treaty were bent on treaticicide. But that ground truth has changed in recent weeks. It has become clear that there are problems with the new agreement that even pro-treaty seantors recognize may require fixing.

The simple fact of the matter is that, in a number of important respects, the fine print of this treaty will permit the Soviets to do things that the general provisions of the agreement are intended to preclude. If the Senate wishes to ensure that the benefits of eliminating two whole classes of nuclear missiles are realized, it had better take note of and insist upon closing the treaty's "details gap." Herewith an illustrative list:

1. The treaty prohibits all INF missiles, but the fine print will not require the Soviets to live up to that prohibition.

Item: The treaty prohibits production of both INF missiles and missile stages, yet the details allow the Soviets to continue to produce the largest stage of their most capable intermediaterange missile, the SS-20.

The truth of the matter is that the Soviets had a problem which we solved for them. The Soviets developed an intercontinental ballistic missile, the SS-25, from the SS-20. It has essentially the same main (or first) stage, the same production and assembly facilities, and requires a very similar launcher and similar training, maintenance, and deployment gear. Since the Soviet Union was not about to let the INF treaty affect longer-range systems like the SS-25, we agreed that the Soviets could continue to produce as many of these common SS-20/25 first stages as they wished. In exchange, they let us watch the gates of one assembly facility. The theory was that if we saw a two-stage SS-20 rolling out the observed gate instead of a three-stage SS-25, we would have a clear-cut violation on our hands.

There are lots of difficulties with this "solution," not the least of which is that it would be child's play for the Soviets to assemble elsewhere SS-20s produced at unmonitored, legal SS-25 manufacturing plants. There is also a considerable inequality involved here; for the privilege of being allowed to observe the gate at the Soviet final assembly facility, we gave the Soviets the right to observe one of our missile-rocket production sites--because we do not have an assembly facility for ballistic INF missiles. Our Pershing IIs are assembled at their deployment sites.

To remedy the imbalance, the Senate should insist upon several changes to the treaty. PErhaps the easiest would be to make approval of these arrangements in the INF treaty contingent upon an agreement to ban the SS-25 in the upcoming Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). This would have the virtue not only of making the INF agreement substantially more verifiable but also of reducing the ease with which the Soviets could violate the much more militarily significant START.

Moreover, senators should require that, in exchange for letting Soviet inspectors observe our missle-production plant, we be permitted to monitor the gates at the SS-20 production facility in the Soviet Union.

Item: The treaty requires that all INF missile launchers be eliminated, but the fine print allows the Soviets to keep hundreds of their most important ones provided they are merely modified.

In one of the sillier efforts we made to accommodate Soviet demands for "equal" treatment, the United States agreed that since we intended to keep the detachable tractor part of our INF missle launchers and cut in half the trailer which carries and fires the missiles, the Soviets could keep their "tractors," too. The only problem is that the Soviet mobile INF missile launchers are not of a tractor-trailer design; theirs are unified systems with the driver's cab mounted on the main body of the missile transporter-erector-launcher. Therefore, incredible as it may seem, under this purported "zero-option"-based treaty, the Soviets will be allowed to maintain a modified version of their entire mobile INF launcher inventory.

The Senate ought to strike this foolish arrangement from the treaty; permitting legal launcher-look-alikes throughout the USSR will give rise to endless controversy and uncertainty here about whether observed launchers have been modified (per treaty stipulations) and, if so, whether the alterations have been reversed. The treaty requires that launchers be eliminated; the Soviets should have to do so.

Item: In order to prevent the Soviets from retaining a militarily effective, covert SS-20 force, the treaty prohibits flight-testing of INF missiles. The fine print, however, permits as many as one hundred missiles to be "destroyed" by launching; the testing thus performed will enhance Soviet confidence in the reliability of their missile force.

Tough the Soviet Union maintained that it could not handle the logistical demands of eliminating all treaty-limited missiles within the specified time unless it was permitted to eliminate some by firing them, it strains credulity that the Soviets can't dispose of an additional one hundred missiles (out of a total of 1,852) in another way. The Senate should require that both sides eliminate all their missiles in the same manner that it currently requires them to destroy all but one hundred.

2. The treaty grants us remarkable and unprecedentedly intrusive rights to monitor the elimination of all Soviet INF missile systems. The fine print, however, allows the USSR to remove from the previously exchanged accounting of their inventory as many treaty-limited systems as they wish--as long as they do it prior to thirty days after the accord enters into force.

The Senate should require the Administration to obtain at once from the Soviet Union a pledge either to afford us immediate on-site monitoring rights, or to commit not to "eliminate" any systems until we enjoy such rights under a ratified treaty.

3. The treaty bans all armed, ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) capable of flying between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. The fine print, however, offers the Soviets a multitude of circumvention options. This general prohibition therefore simply denies the United States critical cruise-missile options for the conventional defense of Europe.

The INF treaty does not define what would constitute a different "type" of cruise missile than those presently in the Soviet inventory, nor does it establish what criteria will permit us to determine if a given cruise missile is unarmed, or that its range cannot be adjusted to fly within the prohibited ban. Consefquently, the Soviets will have a field day developing systems with--at a minimum--the inherent capability to do treaty-banned functions. The treaty, meanwhile, has already begun to inhibit U.S. ground-launched cruise-missile options; manufacturers of drones and remotely piloted vehicles with a host of possible applications on the modern battlefied are beginning to find arms-control constraints impinging upon their designs and permitted performance. There is no point in denying ourselves important rights to conventionally armed cruise missiles--in a vain effort to make the treaty slightly more verifiable.

4. The INF treaty provides unprecedented on-site inspection rights, but its details circumscribe our rights so sharply as to render them largely ineffectual.

In the frenzied negotiating "end-game," the United States completely abandoned its position that, in addition to inspections of declared facilities, we must have the right to conduct short-notice, on-site visits to undeclared--or "suspect"--sites. The result was an agreement which, for all its "verification breakthroughs," actually affords us little more than the right to inspect Potemkin villages.

The Senate should insist that the INF treaty permit on-site inspections at ballistic-missile facilities that are not associated with treaty-limited systems but are suspected of concealing or supporting them. Since the Soviets have agreed, in the Joint Statement issued at the end of the Washington Summit, that they would accept procedures for suspect-site inspections in connection with START, incorporation of such procedures in the INF treaty should not prove an insurmountable task.

As these examples suggest, unless improved by the Senate, the INF treaty will almost certainly not do what it promises. None of the corrective steps recommended here should "kill" the treaty. As it considers these and other constructive proposals designed to enhance the effectiveness, equity, and verifiability of this accord, the Senate must weigh whether a treaty without these fixes is worth having.