Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume XI, START I

272. Memorandum of Conversation¹

Moscow, February 21, 1988, 10:45 a.m.–12:45 p.m.

SUBJECT

• Shultz-Shevardnadze Meetings, February 21 Morning

PARTICIPANTS

• U.S

  • George P. Shultz, Secretary of State
  • Thomas W. Simons, Jr. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State (EUR) (Notetaker)
  • Dimitri Zarechnak (Interpreter)

• U.S.S.R.

  • Eduard Shevardnadze, Minister of Foreign Affairs
  • Sergei Tarasenko, Special Assistant to the Foreign Minister (Notetaker)
  • P. Palazhchenko (Interpreter)

Shevardnadze said he did not think the two ministers needed to spend a long time on the agenda. They would speak at the plenary on the sequence and on the composition of working groups on various problems, as was their tradition.

Shevardnadze said he wished to raise another issue. It would be good if their colleagues would try to prepare a document on the results of their discussions. Perhaps this would not be necessary, but they should see; it had been useful in the past.

The Secretary suggested they see if they had something to say.

Shevardnadze said they should see how things developed. Perhaps they should try to formulate something in one of the working groups.

[Omitted here are discussions not related to START.]

Turning to START, the Secretary said it was important to recognize that we had accomplished a great deal over the previous year. We had worked very hard at the Washington Summit, and the statement agreed there records progress that two or three years before people would have thought it impossible to achieve. The credit belonged to the two leaders. They had put their backs to it, and achieved a great deal.

Our leader were on record that they wanted to complete a START Treaty in the first half of this year, the Secretary continued. We wanted it to be well and carefully done, but it was doable. The job was to get at it.

The INF Treaty had been well received because it was carefully drafted and included sound verification provisions. He remembered that when he had taken it and distributed it to the U.S.’s partners in NATO, they had been astonished at how thorough the verification provisions were. START would have to meet the same rigorous standards, and would be more difficult than INF. But it was still doable.

The Secretary said it was useful to recall what had already been agreed in START:

—6000 warheads;

—1600 strategic missiles and bombers;

—4900 ballistic missile warheads;

—1540 warheads on 154 heavy ICBM’s;

—a throweight ceiling 50 percent below the current Soviet level;

—a bomber weapon counting rule dealing with bombs and short-range missiles; and

—a long list of verification ideas that built upon and went beyond what is in the INF Treaty, including data exchange, various kinds of inspection, and measures to enhance the effectiveness of national technical means.

That was a very impressive list of accomplishments, the Secretary said. The U.S. side wanted to take advantage of it and bring this to fruition. And our view was that while there were still large items to decide, the most likely difficulty was with verification.

The U.S. view, the Secretary said, was that we need to get back into verification, to get going on it as if we were at the end of the negotiation. Our task is to transform the concepts agreed at the Washington Summit into detailed verification procedures. We had seen in negotiating the INF Treaty that when we resolved one issue another appeared in its place. This was a pick and shovel task; it would only yield to hard work.

The U.S. Delegation in Geneva, the Secretary continued, had recently tabled a draft Inspection Protocol and a revised Protocol on Conversion of Elimination. He asked that Shevardnadze’s people work from these documents to produce agreed texts of these important documents. If they found it necessary, they might want to draft their own text. The essential point was that we promptly negotiate these two key documents. We should propose to ourselves to maximize progress on joint drafting of the Protocols before we two ministers met again. They should set the objective of having Shevardnadze’s trip to Washington be the focus for getting them into as good shape as we could.

The Secretary continued that the U.S. side had seen in discussions with the Senate that these issues come to the fore; they take up a high proportion of the total time. Arms control agreements had to pass severe tests—in the negotiating process, in ratification, and while they were in force. Verification and compliance were essential if START were to measure up to these tests.

We had seen in INF that there were many different numbers involved, the Secretary continued. START would be even more difficult. When they had talked in Washington, they had agreed that the START verification approach would include data exchanges, including declarations by each side of the number and location of weapons systems and associated facilities. We wanted to begin the process, and were prepared to be forthcoming now, the Secretary emphasized. We had learned from the INF experience that this important subject should not be left to the last minute. The U.S. side was prepared to table a draft Memorandum of Understanding in Geneva the next week.

This draft MOU would provide for the kinds of data that were contained in the INF MOU, but expanded and adapted to the much more demanding task of START.

The U.S. side was prepared to begin exchanging the data in Geneva that would be contained in the START MOU before the two ministers met the next month.

The Secretary said he was emphasizing this because it was important to get ahead of the curve if the two sides were to complete the task. So that was one part of what he was proposed that day—getting started right away on the data that were necessary for a START Treaty, as was agreed in Washington. He had said it was needed to avoid a last-minute rush, but far more was needed in the case of the START Treaty.

As the Soviet and U.S. sides jointly thought through the problem of how to verify a START Treaty, the Secretary went on, where they did not have the advantages of a zero outcome, and where they had to verify with confidence the size of the remaining forces on both sides, the U.S. side believed that both would need to know much more than they now did about how each acquired, deployed and maintained strategic forces.

If they were successfully to verify, they needed to understand that better than they did now. That was true across the board, but it was especially true with regard to mobile missiles. The U.S. side agreed that they had things to be said for them, but they also presented verification problems.

The overall problem had two aspects. One was to have a better understanding of the magnitude of the on-site inspection tasks the sides would have to contemplate understanding. They were going to put this in place for INF, but that would be small in comparison to START, and the two sides needed to begin doing the things they would need to do.

The U.S. side thought that meant they would need to know more about each other’s production plans and procedures, about each other’s maintenance requirements and practices, and how each side replaced items which were used, wore out, or became obsolete, in order to make it possible to establish nodes at which periodic or random checks or perhaps permanent monitoring that might assure adequate confidence that ceilings would not be exceeded.

The U.S. side recognized that this would be very sensitive and difficult, the Secretary said. Our own military was swallowing and perspiring, asking what it was getting into. He had told them that if we wanted the Treaty that was the implication: the Soviet Union needed to know more and vice versa. If this was not possible, the military should blow the whistle. And it had not. General Powell said the military was having a bad time. Shevardnadze commented that U.S. military people must be very emotional.

The Secretary concluded that he had wished to call attention to these proposals on data exchange. He suggested that the two ministers instruct the delegations to shape up the three documents by the time the ministers met in March.

Shevardnadze said he would respond after lunch. (The meeting concluded at 12:45 p.m.)

1. Source: Department of State, Executive Secretariat, S/S-IRM Records, Memoranda of Conversations Pertaining to United States and USSR Relations, 1981–1990, Lot 93D188, Moscow—Feb 88—Shultz/Shev. Secret; Sensitive. The meeting took place in the Soviet Foreign Ministry Guest House. Shultz departed Washington on February 19 and met with Koivisto in Helsinki from February 20 to 21 before arriving in Moscow on February 21. The complete memorandum of conversation is scheduled for publication in Foreign Relations, 1981–1988, vol. VI, Soviet Union, October 1986–January 1989, Document 121.