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(Washington, D.C.): Washington’s Center for Security Policy today took sharp issue with the efforts of an unofficial contingent of Americans who, in league with Soviet officials, are undermining the U.S. government’s stance on a vital element of the United States’ deterrent force — the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM).

"With yesterday’s ‘experiment’ in the Black Sea, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has once again engaged in its own, freelance diplomacy with an organization of the Soviet government, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to the detriment of American security interests and to the advantage of the USSR’s anti-nuclear propaganda campaign," said Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director.

"These are the same two organizations that cooked up the bizarre visit by several Congressmen two years ago to the illegal Soviet radar at Krasnoyarsk," Gaffney added. "The American participants in that extravaganza were used to advance the Soviet Union’s wholly specious line that this radar did not violate the 1972 ABM Treaty."

Gaffney said, "Now, the self-appointed American verification experts associated with the NRDC have involved themselves in another carefully orchestrated effort whose character is, in the final analysis, essentially political, not scientific."

Sven Kraemer, Deputy Director of the Center and former Director of Arms Control in the Reagan National Security Council observed that, if anything, the Soviet-NRDC "experiment" revealed the intractable problems inherent in SLCM arms control: "The Soviets carefully orchestrated the whole affair, apparently including dry runs on the tests for days before the Americans showed up. They took the absurd step of stripping the ship on which the monitored cruise missile was located of competing radiation sources, such as other warheads. The Soviets also strictly controlled where the Americans could place their monitoring equipment and ensured that the equipment used could not penetrate through the deck of the ship or — for that matter — through lead shielding that might be placed in a launch-tube."

"In short, the effect of this Potemkin exercise is to trivialize the real and insoluble problems of cruise missile verification," Kraemer summarized. "Worse yet, it encourages the public to believe that significant and ill-advised constraints can be placed upon a vital American weapon system on the basis of trust in Soviet good intentions."

The Center for Security Policy believes that sea-launched cruise missiles contribute in a highly cost-effective manner to the survivability and effectiveness of the U.S. strategic deterrent. Interestingly, enhancing these qualities is supposed to be an objective of a future START agreement, too. As the Soviet-NRDC "experiment" makes clear, however, no means has yet been found to devise verifiable limits on SLCMs. Consequently, the United States must maintain the latitude to deploy its sea-based cruise missile force flexibly and, therefore, eschew unverifiable arms control agreements inconsistent with such practice.

Center for Security Policy

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