United States would be willing for the Vienna Review Conference to reconfirm the Madrid mandate for the continuation of the CDE to negotiate additional confidence and securitybuilding measures.

The Soviet Union argues that the Stockholm Document

represents the successful conclusion of the first phase of the CDE and that the Vienna Review Conference should mandate a second stage of the CDE with the Madrid mandate supplemented to include questions of disarmament. The United States and its NATO allies believe there is more to be done in the field of military openness and that the CDE should be resumed to continue its work on CSBMs.

In the meantime, NATO ministers on December 11 issued the Brussels Declaration on Conventional Arms Control which proposes, in addition, negotiations "to eliminate existing disparities, from the Atlantic-to-the-Urals, and establish conventional stability at lower levels." Thus, the NATO foreign ministers have publicly asked the Warsaw Pact members to follow up their rhetoric in good faith by entering into a new and separate set of negotiations among the twenty-three members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, whose forces bear most immediately upon the essential security relationship in Europe.

VERIFICATION AND COMPLIANCE

Verification is the technical, analytical, and political process by which the United States evaluates compliance with existing arms control agreements and obligations. The verification of arms control agreements may be said to have three

distinct purposes:

First, verification serves to detect violations of an agreement (or to provide evidence that violations may have occurred), and hence to furnish, as far as is possible, timely

warning of emerging threats to a nation's security arising from a violation of a treaty.

Second, by increasing the risk of detection and complicating any scheme of evasion, verification helps to deter violations of an agreement. The deterrent value of verification depends to a considerable extent on a potential violator's uncertainty as to the exact capability of the techniques used by the other party to monitor his compliance with an agreement a fact which highlights the importance of the secrecy regarding many of these techniques. This deterrent function presupposes knowledge that detection of a violation will involve some concrete response to the illicit activity.

Third, verification serves to build domestic and international confidence in the viability of an arms control agreement. At the same time, it provides an important safeguard against wishful illusions and against possible manipulation of an atmosphere of trust in the pursuit of unilateral advantage. Soviet Noncompliance

The US Government has verified that the Soviet Union has violated provisions of most of the bilateral and multilateral arms control agreements to which the United States and the Soviet Union are parties. Three classified and unclassified versions of these Congressionally-mandated Presidential reports on Soviet noncompliance have been forwarded to Congress, in January 1984, February 1985, and December 1985. An updated report was in its final stages at the end of December 1986. ACDA played a key role in the preparation of these reports.

The reports included a thorough analysis of the Soviet Union's obligations under existing arms control agreements based upon the specific terms of these agreements and, where necessary, on the negotiating record. The US Government used the best information and analytical resources available in addressing compliance questions, and employed an extremely high standard of evidence to determine whether or not the

Soviet Union was in compliance.

Careful consideration was

given to possible uncertainties and ambiguities inherent in some of the evidence or analytical methods, and where these existed, no violation was charged or findings were qualified by terms such as "likely" or "probable."

Much of the data gathered by National Technical Means (NTM) of verification is sensitive, and because of the confidentiality rule for bilateral negotiations, much of the information that led to the conclusions cannot be fully disclosed on an unclassified basis. The compliance findings are, however, as comprehensive as possible within these sensitivity constraints.

After extensive study, the US Government found that the Soviet Union has violated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) I Interim Agreement, the SALT II Treaty, the 1925 Geneva Protocol as reflected in the rules of customary international law, the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, and the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. In addition, the US Government concluded that it is likely that the USSR has violated the 150 kiloton threshold limit of the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty.

The US Government has raised compliance issues with the Soviet Government on numerous occasions and through numerous diplomatic channels, including the Standing Consultative Commission (SCC), which meets twice annually. In doing so, the United States has made it perfectly clear that it expects the Soviet Union to take positive steps to correct its noncompliance and to resolve the other compliance concerns. The Soviet responses in many cases not only failed to satisfy our concerns, but often strengthened our determination that the Soviet Union has disregarded its arms control obligations and commitments. The Soviet Union has neither provided satisfactory explanations nor undertaken corrective action sufficient to resolve our concerns.

The President has offered the Soviet Union numerous opportunities to cease and reverse their noncompliance. In June 1985, the President announced that despite the Soviet pattern of noncompliance, the United States would go the extra mile and refrain from undercutting existing strategic arms agreements to the extent that the Soviet Union exercises comparable restraint. At the same time, however, the President decided that in light of the pattern of Soviet noncompliance and their massive military buildup, the United States would have to take appropriate and proportionate responses when needed to protect its own security. The Soviet Union did not exercise comparable restraint. The President's Report on Soviet Noncompliance with Arms Control Agreements, December 23, 1985, stated that:

The Soviet Union has not provided explanations suf-
ficient to alleviate our concerns, nor has the Soviet
Union taken actions needed to correct existing vio-
lations. Instead, they have continued to assert that
they are in complete compliance with their arms control
obligations and commitments.

Indeed, while the United States continued to strictly observe
its treaty commitments, meeting with the Soviets in the SCC
and other fora to attempt to persuade them to reverse their
violations and resolve our other compliance concerns, the
Soviets continued to violate these same commitments.

After reviewing relevant Soviet actions and US response options, the President determined on May 27, 1986, that, in the future, the United States must base decisions regarding its strategic force structure on the nature and magnitude of the threat posed by Soviet strategic forces, not on standards contained in the SALT structure which had been undermined by Soviet noncompliance. The President also stated that since

the United States would remain in technical compliance for some months, he hoped that the Soviet Union would use that period

to take the constructive steps necessary to alter the situation, and that if they did so, the United States would certainly take this into account.

In July 1986, the US Government met with the Soviets for a Special Session of the SCC, at the request of the Soviet Union, to again explain this policy to the Soviets and to once again extend our offer of an interim framework of truly mutual restraint. The Soviets rejected this offer.

Soviet noncompliance has been discussed with the Soviet Union at the highest level. President Reagan has raised Soviet noncompliance, including the Krasnoyarsk radar deployed in violation of the ABM Treaty, with General Secretary Gorbachev in Geneva and again during the October 1986 talks in Reykjavik. Effective Verification

Another important process relating to verification is

the evaluation of the degree to which a prospective arms control proposal or provision is verifiable or the "verifiability" of the agreement.

The process of determining whether a prospective agreement is effectively verifiable has two phases. The first phase is a technical and analytic process which weighs the present and programmed US collection, processing, analysis and reporting capabilities against the activities proposed to be limited. This analysis must take into account credible cheating scenarios and the high standard of evidence demonstrated to be necessary within the US Government in order to reach a decision that

noncompliance has occurred. This phase provides an assessment of the "degree of verifiability," or the degree to which compliance with an agreement, including the agreement's objective and purpose, can be verified by identifying those "undetectable" evasion scenarios that may be implemented should the Soviets attempt to evade the Treaty.

When the first phase is complete and the treaty-specific limitations of our technical verification capabilities have been identified, the second phase addresses whether verification is effective. This assessment takes into account the results of the first phase and considers other factors including: