Bigger and Getting Better

By William R. Doerner

The timing was a publisher's dream. Just a day after the U.S. Navy went up against Soviet SA-5 missiles in the Gulf of Sidra, the Pentagon issued the 1986 edition of its annual review, Soviet Military Power. So when Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger held a press conference to publicize the Pentagon's latest assessment of Kremlin armed might, he had a full and attentive audience. But after being peppered with questions about the missile exchange off Libya, the Secretary asked plaintively, "I thought maybe I would like to talk about my book now. Would that be all right?"

The splashy, well-illustrated 156-page SMP, first brought out in 1981, offers a few scoops: blurred but unique photographs of the Soviet SS-20 intermediate-range missile that threatens Western Europe, Japan and China; and photos of one of the three new Delta IV-class nuclear-powered submarines and of the Su-27 Flanker, an air-defense fighter deployed only this year. But overall, reviews of the book were lukewarm. While many U.S. military experts outside the Pentagon think SMP has improved in accuracy and candor with each new edition, they still regard it as less than totally objective. "It is a political document," says John Collins, the author of a respected 1985 study, U.S.-Soviet Military Balance. "The authors emphasize what is hot."

One of the hottest concerns in the Pentagon, strongly emphasized in SMP, is that the U.S. military is losing its historical edge in weapons technology. While the Soviets continue to stress their traditional strength in numbers of tanks, planes and artillery, said Weinberger, "they have more weapons of higher quality and higher capability." He noted, for example, that the Soviets have installed a U.S.-designed state-of-the-art radar, obtained through espionage, in many new fighter aircraft.

Pentagon analysts believe that the Soviets are embarked on a decade-long strategy to reduce the vulnerability of their nearly 1,400 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, the heart of their nuclear arsenal. By the mid-1990s, these weapons will be either ensconced in "superhardened" underground silos or based on mobile platforms that are difficult to locate and target. Even the large, multiple-warhead SS-X-24 missile, says SMP, will be deployed first on mobile rail cars, possibly by late this year. The U.S. has only been studying the possibility of developing a mobile missile, the single-warhead Midgetman.

The book contends that the Soviets have deployed more than 70 SS-25 missiles, a mobile system armed with a single warhead. The rapid deployment of these weapons, begun only last year, is particularly galling to the Reagan Administration, which considers them a violation of the 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement. That treaty, which the U.S. never has ratified but has agreed to observe, permits each side to develop only one new ICBM. Washington charges that the SS-25 is the Soviets' second (the first was the SS-X-24), while Moscow counts it as merely an updated version of the aging SS- 13.

SMP calls attention to the more than $99 billion in arms sales to Soviet allies in the past 20 years. But Soviet arms merchants are hard pressed by U.S. competition ($98 billion in arms sales abroad between 1964 and 1983). And Soviet allies could not have been reassured last week as U.S. jets and HARM missiles outclassed Soviet antiaircraft batteries in the Gulf of Sidra.

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington