U.S. Holds a Dry Run for Soviet Inspection of Missile Facilities

By MELISSA HEALY

June 14, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The newly created U.S. On-Site Inspection Agency, the government body largely responsible for ensuring compliance with the new U.S.-Soviet medium-range missile treaty, Monday conducted an extensive dry run for the first Soviet inspection of an American missile facility.

And although the exercise went without a hitch, it dramatized the challenges that will be involved when the organization begins to dispatch hundreds of Soviet inspectors July 1 to 26 sites in the United States and Western Europe for an initial round of checks.

The sleepy Redstone Arsenal missile depot outside Huntsville, where 30 years ago engineers developed the rocket booster that would become the now-banned Pershing missile, is one of the sites bracing for the arrival in early June of a team of Soviet arms experts. The other 14 U.S. facilities include General Dynamics’ San Diego plant.

At the same time, American inspectors will begin their work at 133 Soviet and East European bases, under detailed guidelines negotiated by the United States and the Soviet Union during three months of technical bargaining.

The inspections, which begin barely a month after President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev formally ratified the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, will be “a new and different experience for us,” the Redstone base commander, Maj. Gen. Thomas Reese, concedes.

Overall, it is a task for which the United States has organized 200 people in 19 time zones, tied together by a worldwide communications network and orchestrated by a complex computer program.

Terms of the treaty will test both U.S. and Soviet logistical skills, as escort teams from each superpower race against the clock to accommodate the other’s demands for snap inspections.

In an inspection, specially trained American escorts would have 16 hours’ notice of the Soviets’ arrival, either at Dulles Airport outside Washington or at San Francisco. Once the Soviet inspectors tell their American hosts which site they want to visit, the United States must scramble to get them to their destination within nine hours. The Pentagon will press Air Force C-141 transport planes into service for the task.

On Monday, Pentagon officials whisked U.S. and Soviet reporters to Redstone Arsenal from Dulles. The exercise, though more than a week in the making, demonstrated that the new Pentagon agency is “about as ready as we could expect when embarking on something that’s never been tried,” said Brig. Gen. Roland Lajoie, director of the organization.

The exercise also gave Redstone Arsenal officials a chance to try on their new diplomatic roles. When a Soviet reporter asked one official where the nuclear warheads are kept, a bristling reply quickly drew the limits of the treaty.

“They’re not treaty-limited items,” said Col. Thomas M. Brown, project manager of the Pershing missile program. “You’re not entitled to see them, and I’m not obliged to discuss them.”

Under the treaty, 859 U.S. and 1,831 Soviet medium-range missiles are to be eliminated.