THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 18, 1995 TAG: 9503180211
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
The chief of a Russian team inspecting U.S. East Coast nuclear weapons facilities said Friday that disagreements have arisen between his 10-member group and its American escorts.
Still, both sides found general success during initial inspections conducted under provisions of a treaty reducing long-range nuclear weapons. The team visited the Navy's Dam Neck installation Friday after touring a nuclear submarine base in Georgia, its first East Coast stop.
Gen. Maj. Nikolaiy Shabalin said the disagreements arose during the King's Bay tour, but neither side would elaborate on them. The Americans suggested that it may have been a matter of interpretation.
``We managed to resolve them in a mutually adequate way,'' Shabalin said through an interpreter.
Army Lt. Col. Norm Hoerer, serving as American team chief for the U.S. On-Site Inspection Agency, said the disagreements stem from interpretations of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and are not serious.
``This was the first time actual inspections were conducted using this treaty,'' Lt. Cmdr. Tina Tallman, an OSIA spokeswoman, added. ``Until you actually do the inspections, you don't know where you are going to run into these problems.''
The team was visiting the Fleet Combat Training Center at Dam Neck to verify that a building formerly occupied by the Naval Guided Missiles School is indeed closed. It shut its doors in September 1994.
What the foreign inspectors found at Dam Neck is a building stripped of its teaching tools, which included mock-ups 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.
Shabalin, asked to elaborate on his statement, said he could not.
``I would like to stress that all arguments we had on inspection sites are resolved in a confidential manner by the appropriate policy (group) in this country and in Russia,'' he said.
Overall, he said, team members feel they are a part of history as the two former adversaries carry out their agreement to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles.
``I hope . . . in your country and in our country in Russia there will be more peace and the nuclear threat will be more and more far away from us,'' he said.
The START treaty, signed in 1991 and effective last Dec. 5, limits the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers.
During a 120-day base-line period, inspections will be conducted to verify information exchanged about nuclear sites in the United States and in the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and the Ukraine.
Previously, as adversaries, the United States and the Soviet Union could only guess at one another's nuclear capabilities.
The inspections began earlier this month and will be conducted at 35 sites in the United States and 65 in the former Soviet Union. A separate Russian team began its work last week at West Coast sites.
The team in Virginia Beach gave no hint as to which site it would select next. by CNB