By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 3 1997; Page A15

India's military forces recently moved a handful of medium-range ballistic missiles to a prospective launch site near the Pakistani border, raising fresh concerns in Washington that the two enemies may have entered a provocative phase in their long-standing arms race, U.S. officials disclosed yesterday.

The missiles, called Prithvis, currently are capable of carrying conventional but not nuclear warheads. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that fewer than a dozen are now located near the city of Jullundur in the state of Punjab in northwest India. The site is a long way from the factory where most of their Prithvi components were produced, at Hyderabad in southern India, and constitutes a serious ratcheting-up by the Indian military of its historic rivalry with Pakistan's armed forces, the officials said.

Some U.S. intelligence officials have privately described the movement of the missiles as the first operational deployment of the Prithvi since its development began more than a decade ago. But several other officials cautioned that Washington does not know if all of the equipment and troops needed to launch the missiles are also at the site near Jullundur; one official claimed "the best judgment" is that the requisite gear is not there.

"We know that the missiles have been moved, and in the wrong direction," said one U.S. official who is familiar with intelligence reports on the matter. "This is going to prompt a bad reaction -- even an overreaction" in Pakistan, said another official.

There are two versions of the Prithvi, a single-stage, truck-mounted missile derived from Soviet technology. The army's version has an estimated range of 93 miles, giving it the capability to be launched from an area near the Indian border and hit Pakistan's capital at Islamabad or major cities such as Lahore, Faisalabad, and Rawalpindi, the U.S. officials said.

They expressed uncertainty why the missiles were moved to that site at a time when senior Indian and Pakistani political officials have begun moving toward an improved dialogue and a possible reduction of tensions. But one U.S. official said Indian military officials "may have felt some pressure" from legislators and security analysts who began agitating publicly for deployment of the Prithvi as soon as its flight tests were completed this spring.

Speaking about the U.S. effort to prevent a missile arms race on the South Asian subcontinent, a senior U.S. official said, "It looks like that's starting to come unraveled."

Other officials who spoke on condition of anonymity provided details of the Indian action and amplified this expression of concern, predicting that Pakistan may react to its disclosure by taking some provocative new military action of its own -- possibly including making a public declaration that it has deployed similar medium-range missiles of its own, known as M-11s.

India has been developing five warheads for the Prithvi that are packed with conventional explosives, two versions of which are evidently completed. A Pentagon report in April 1996 said that "the Indian Army has completed user trials with the Prithvi," meaning that it has practiced moving the missiles around and launching them from sites that had been specially surveyed in advance.

India does not now have the capability to equip the Prithvi with a nuclear warhead but is believed by Washington to be working on such a capability, one U.S. official said. Pakistan may already have completed its development of a nuclear warhead for its M-11s, which U.S. intelligence officials say have been stored at an air force base west of Lahore.

Pakistani officials have hinted in the past that the country might respond to the missile deployment by dropping its public denial that it has M-11s, which U.S. officials say were purchased several years ago from China. If it did so, U.S. officials said, the Clinton administration would be forced to act under a law aimed at discouraging missile proliferation by invoking wide-ranging trade sanctions against China.

Shiv S. Mukherjee, a spokesman for India's embassy in Washington, declined to comment on the U.S. allegations about the Prithvi yesterday.