The Bush administration will try to determine if limits on mobile missiles can be verified as it proceeds toward an accord on long-range weapons with the Soviet Union, a senior defense official said Friday.
The plan could lead to a major departure from previous negotiating strategy-abandoning the Reagan administration proposal to ban all U.S. and Soviet mobile missiles.
The official added, however, that the administration wants Congress first to line up behind President Bush`s proposals to create an American arsenal of mobile missiles aboard rail cars or trucks.
The Soviet Union already has deployed two types of mobile missiles: one with 10 warheads aboard railroad cars and another with a single warhead atop trucks. The entire U.S. fleet of land-based missiles remains in silos that can be targeted with pinpoint accuracy by Soviet missiles.
That outline of Bush`s arms-control strategy came as American and Soviet negotiators prepare to resume Strategic Arms Reductions Talks (START) in Geneva on Monday to halve superpower strategic, or long-range, arsenals.
Bush, in a defense of a spending proposal to be debated on Capitol Hill beginning Tuesday, advocates lifting the fleet of 50 MX missiles, each with 10 warheads, from silos in Wyoming and placing them aboard rail cars.
The Bush budget also includes a proposal to proceed with building 500 single-warhead missiles, called the Midgetman, that would be scattered atop flatbed trucks in time of war.
”We can`t go into a START regime where mobiles are permitted and we don`t have any,” said the senior defense official, who outlined themes of the administration`s thinking on the condition that he not be identified.
At the same time, administration officials are lobbying Congress to approve funding for two types of mobile missiles-even if the Reagan proposal to ban these weapons remains-on the grounds that a U.S. program is necessary as a negotiating tool and to preserve America`s land-based fleet in case of attack.
In that sense, one veteran congressional staff member said, the Bush strategy ”is a way to pressure us and get additional votes” in favor of the administration budget.
But the senior defense official stressed, ”Even in the absence of START, it is important to have a mobile (missile).”
Administration negotiators, like those in the Reagan White House, fear that the characteristic of mobility that renders these missiles safer from attack will make it difficult to verify treaty compliance.
Even today, the official said, there is ”a rather large uncertainty”
over how many mobile missiles the Soviet Union has deployed.
”That`s the first priority,” the official explained. ”If we permit mobiles (under a START treaty), how do we verify them? Verification is at the heart of the mobiles problem.”
The defense official did not elaborate on possible verification methods to be considered.
But a variety of military experts have proposed solutions, including on-site inspection of factories; limits on the geographic area of deployment in peacetime to areas open to inspection; or periodic, predetermined displays of missiles to orbiting satellites.
In the past, arms talks have focused initially on limits or reductions in strategic arsenals, with questions of verification coming only as a treaty was finalized by negotiators-or brought to the Senate for ratification.
The Bush administration thinks verification ”should not be the caboose” in the long train of arms negotiations, the official said.
If a verification program is developed, Bush still will require ”some confidence” that Congress will fund a mobile missile arsenal allowed under a START treaty, the official said.
The official, though, conceded that ”there is no magic thing that locks Congress forever into a program,” and that a mobile-missile project funded in one budget could be killed in the next.
However, it is possible that Bush and congressional leaders could reach agreement to proceed with building a mobile-missile arsenal throughout a specified number of budgets.
During START talks, U.S. and Soviet negotiators also are expected to discuss limits on missiles held in reserves, as well as a system to count warheads on each missile instead of just the vehicles themselves, the official said.
