Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika by Scott Ritter

Author:Scott Ritter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Clarity Press
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure Two: Downtown Votkinsk

Despite all the trials and tribulations of the first six months of treaty implementation, 1989 was getting off to a good start.

This, however, was not good enough for the detractors of arms control who resided in the US Senate. “During the ratification debate,” the Republican Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, wrote in a letter to President Reagan, dated January 12, 1988, “the US inspection rights at the Votkinsk Factory Portal were correctly proclaimed by your Administration as the heart or keystone of the INF verification regime.”

Helms pointed out in his letter that the CargoScan X-ray system had not been installed at Votkinsk “because the Soviets have made unacceptable demands for other procedures and provisions,” and that “the Soviets have also failed to complete the construction of the necessary facilities for the X-ray equipment.” Helms concluded that “the US has been totally unable to monitor effectively or verify whether the Soviets have continued to manufacture or deploy perhaps dozens of banned SS-20 missiles from the Votkinsk factory.”

Despite the fact that these statements were patently false, Senator Helms, through written questions submitted to the Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, William Burns, continued his attack on the INF treaty implementation process. Helms characterized the non-installation of CargoScan as a “Soviet refusal to grant to the US its INF Treaty-mandated rights to X-ray.” Helms also brought up the issue of inspection rights concerning the weighing of railcars exiting the Votkinsk factory. “Did the US somehow waive its weighing rights?” he asked. “Why were these US weighing rights waived? Under whose authority were these weighing rights waived?” Helms went on to label the “Soviet refusal” to allow INF Treaty mandated weighing and X-ray rights “the most serious Soviet violation so far of the INF Treaty.”

Helms was wrong both in his characterization of what had transpired in Votkinsk, and why. Politics and reality, however, did not often occupy the same space. The concerns of the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee became the concerns of the Reagan administration, prompting the Director of Verification for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, Sally Horn, to ask OSIA for clarification. “What is the status,” Horn wrote in a letter to OSIA, “of the installation of US equipment at Votkinsk? Please provide specific information concerning what monitoring equipment has been installed and is functioning and what remains to be installed and/or turned on. Also provide rationale for any delays that have been encountered.”

The Director for Verification Policy closed by declaring that “[t]he above information is requested by opening of business, January 26, 1989.”

Like anything in Washington, DC, the issue of CargoScan not only became political, but also public. On January 24, 1989, The Washington Times ran an article written by Bill Gertz, a staff writer with a long history of receiving classified leaks from David Sullivan to help shape stories that pushed the Helms agenda. Titled “US balks at giving Soviets high-tech INF software,” the article

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