THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 23, 1995 TAG: 9502230343
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
A once-secret nuclear guided-missile school at Dam Neck will be opened for inspection to the former Soviet republics beginning March 1 as the United States and its former adversaries begin measuring each other's nuclear capabilities.
What they'll find at the Virginia Beach installation is a vacant building, its missile parts and training tools moved elsewhere as part of a campaign that also is driven by the warming of East-West relations - military downsizing.
But the visit remains a crucial part of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, said Navy Capt. Chuck Mulroy, commanding officer of the Dam Neck Fleet Combat Training Center.
Called a ``close-out'' inspection, the Dam Neck visit will be a one-time event. It follows the U.S. declaration that the installation no longer contains or supports any weapon system limited by the START I treaty, signed in 1991.
``Sometime within the next four months, we expect to see them here,'' Mulroy said.
Previously, as adversaries, the United States and the Soviet Union could only guess at one another's nuclear capabilities. Their spying budgets ballooned as they tried to learn more. But under the START treaty, which became effective Dec. 5, each side will be able to verify the numbers through on-site inspections.
Those inspections begin next week at 35 sites in the United States and 65 in the former republics of the Soviet Union where nuclear weapons are kept - Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The inspections will continue through mid-July.
What the foreign inspectors will find at Dam Neck is a building stripped of its teaching tools, which included mockups of Trident D-4 missile systems aboard U.S. Navy submarines.
The school, which operated for 40 years on the Virginia Beach coastline, trained an estimated 30,000 students in the maintenance and operation of sea-launched missile systems.
With the number of ballistic missile submarines slashed in military downsizing, the school was closed Sept. 30. Some of its functions were moved to the Great Lakes and some were absorbed by other commands at Dam Neck.
The Fleet Training Center at Charleston, S.C., also closing, is another site the Russians may visit. Also on their itinerary are heavy bomber facilities at 16 sites across the country, along with nine intercontinental ballistic missile facilities, two submarine bases and seven submarine-launched ballistic missile facilities.
The 10 foreign inspectors - military officers, scientists and weapons technicians - decide on their own when they want to visit. They could decide not to visit at all.
To minimize the possibility of cheating, neither side needs to give advance notice. Once they give the word, the United States must get them there within nine hours.
Mulroy and his staff will lead the inspectors into areas capable of holding the missile parts, but they don't have to open the entire base to Russian inspection.
``If it is within a declared area, they have a right to go in,'' said Army Maj. Joe Richard, a spokesman for the On-Site Inspection Agency, responsible for implementing the inspection, escorting the inspectors and monitoring the visits. ``But the captain can keep them out of other areas that are outside the zone. The treaty is very specific.''
KEYWORDS: U.S. DAM NECK FLEET COMBAT TRAINING CENTER by CNB