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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.