Super-Power weapons verification begins

Press, 6 July 1988, Page 10

Super-Power weapons verification begins

NZPA-Reuter Salt Lake City

As local schoolchildren waved “Welcome Soviets” banners, a team of Soviet inspectors arrived in Salt Lake City this week to begin their mission of ensuring the elimination of two types of nuclear missile.

In addition to waving banners, the children passed out red, white and blue balloons to the 23member Soviet team in Utah to monitor United States compliance with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty signed on December 9 at the Washington summit.

“I think we’re witnessing an historic occasion," said Colonel George Connell of the United States Defence Department’s new On-Site Inspection Agency.

“For the first time in the relations between our two countries, inspectors will physically verify an arms control agreement.”

Teams of United States inspectors have arrived in the Soviet Union to begin checking missile sites near Moscow and Votinsk. In all, 26 United States and Western Europe missile sites and 126 in the Soviet Union have been opened for super-Power inspection.

The Soviet delegation, led by Anatoly Samarin, is at Hercules Aerospace in West Valley City, about 16km west of Salt Lake City, to inspect shipments leaving the facility to ensure no additional medium-range Pershing II missiles are produced there.

Under the terms of the treaty, the two countries will eliminate their shorter-range, land-based missiles within 18 months and longer-range missiles within three years. About 80 Soviet inspectors arrived at Travis Air Force Base in California on July 1. The others are fanning out to inspect INF treaty sites in Colorado,

California and Arizona. Meanwhile a British official said in Moscow that Soviet authorities had refused British experts access to two installations during a visit to a chemical warfare facility aimed at speeding completion of a convention banning the deadly weapons. Tessa Solesby, the British ambassador to the 40nation Geneva talks on eliminating chemical weapons, expressed disappointment at a news conference that the delegation’s request to inspect two complexes linked by a road to the sprawling Shikhany facility on the Volga River had been rejected.