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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."