The Senate yesterday approved the historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty by an unexpectedly strong vote of 93 to 5, sending it to Moscow for formal ratification by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at their summit meeting next week.
As the vote was announced to the hushed chamber, the public galleries burst into rare applause that then spread like a wave among senators in a dramatic tribute to the first U.S.-Soviet arms agreement to win Senate approval in 16 years.
The treaty passed without any scars from Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and other conservative Republican foes whose "killer amendments" were emphatically rejected and whose delaying tactics were crushed in a final bipartisan push to approve the treaty before the start of the summit on Sunday.
While the two-thirds vote necessary for ratification was never in doubt, the margin of victory was about twice what treaty strategists originally expected. Only Helms, Gordon J. Humphrey (R-N.H.), Steve Symms (R-Idaho), Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) and Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) voted against final approval. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) was absent because of illness; Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) missed the vote because of the death of his mother-in-law.
The only major condition attached to the treaty was a Democratic proposal, stemming from a fight with Reagan over whether Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) testing is permitted under the 1972 Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, to ban future administrations from reinterpreting the INF pact without Senate approval. Slightly modified to win Republican support, it was attached to the treaty Thursday by a vote of 72 to 27.
Shortly after the midafternoon vote on the treaty, Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Minority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.), flanked by other key figures in the Senate's four painstaking months of work on the treaty, spoke by phone with Reagan to inform him of treaty approval.
Byrd told Reagan, who had stopped in Finland en route to Moscow, that the treaty demonstrated what the government can accomplish when its executive and legislative branches pull together despite political differences. "This is really America's treaty, not ours or the president's . . . and that is why we had such a tremendous vote," Dole told the president.
Reagan thanked both senators and invited them to Moscow for the official exchange of ratification documents on Wednesday. They accepted. White House chief of staff Howard H. Baker Jr. will leave for Moscow today with the treaty; Byrd and Dole will follow on Monday, according to administration officials.
Byrd later told colleagues that this was "truly one of the finest hours of the United States Senate," a tribute that contrasted sharply with the partisan recriminations of the previous evening when the treaty bogged down in a dispute over the interpretation issue and an angry Byrd sent the Senate home to cool off.
The strategy worked, and a more docile Senate returned in the morning, ready to end its nearly two weeks of debate and give its "consent," as the Constitution requires, to ratification of the pact.
The treaty, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in Washington on Dec. 8 after eight years of on-and-off negotiations, is the first superpower pact to scrap an entire class of nuclear weapons.
Over three years, it will eliminate all ground-based nuclear missiles with ranges of 300 to 3,400 miles -- 859 U.S. missiles and 1,836 Soviet missiles -- under an unprecedented arrangement for on-site monitoring of compliance at weapons facilities in both countries.
While it will destroy only 5 percent of the superpowers' nuclear arsenals, its political significance is expected to exceed its military impact as a step toward broader arms reductions, including possible progress at the summit toward a strategic arms reduction treaty (START) agreement for a 50 percent reduction in strategic nuclear weapons.
The Senate's scrutiny of the INF Treaty was unprecedented in its scope and depth, according to Senate leaders, and a START treaty, because of its more far-reaching implications, would be expected to encounter an even tougher course through the Senate.
But the Senate balked yesterday at a strongly worded "go-slow-on-START" resolution that Byrd and Dole agreed to support in order to help get Helms to abandon his delaying tactics against the treaty earlier this week.
As originally drafted by Helms, it would have required advance consultation with the Senate on any proposals for a START agreement, which critics claimed would virtually bar any strategic arms negotiations at the summit.
When it reappeared yesterday, it was sharply modified to call for consultations on START with the Senate and U.S. allies but lacked implied constraints on U.S. moves at the summit. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), who had led the fight against the earlier Helms version, said it had been rendered into "harmless verbiage" and declared it acceptable.
"I'm glad we will not send President Reagan to Moscow muzzled and in handcuffs," said Cranston, the assistant Democratic leader. But Helms claimed it was significant in that it would prohibit any interim START agreement at the summit from constraining U.S. arms programs. The modified proposal was approved as a treaty declaration, binding only on the United States, by a vote of 94 to 4.
In nine days of deliberations on the bill, the Senate rejected more than a dozen "killer amendments" that would have required renegotiation and probably been spurned by the Soviets, including one from Helms that challenged Gorbachev's authority to sign the treaty in the first place.
Others, most of which were defeated by margins of 7 or 8 to 1, would have tied INF implementation to a variety of conditions, including Soviet compliance with other arms agreements, strengthening of non-nuclear NATO forces and ratification of a START agreement. A proposal to exempt conventional ground-launched cruise missiles from the ban was rejected by more than 2 to 1. Among the relatively few provisos that were adopted was one calling on the United States to continue pushing for human rights compliance in the Soviet Union and an omnibus package that included last-minute U.S.-Soviet agreements on banning INF-range "futuristic" weapons and clarifying on-site verification requirements.
In action on a final series of amendments yesterday, the Senate:
Rejected, 64 to 33 and 67 to 30, two proposals from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) to dilute the impact of the previously approved treaty interpretation proviso.
Approved a proposal from Dole to clear up a "double-negative" drafting problem that some senators feared could have given the Soviets a loophole for failure to destroy some weapons.
Threw out by voice vote a proposal from Helms to require withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe when U.S. missiles are withdrawn on grounds that the security of the troops and their dependents could no longer be assured.
Rejected, 66 to 30, a Wallop proposal that would have required Reagan to tell Gorbachev that the United States is prepared to withdraw from the INF Treaty if the Soviets commit any violation of its terms.
Dismissed, 86 to 10, a move by Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) that would have barred Reagan from ratifying the treaty until he certified to the Senate that the Soviets were "faithfully meeting" their human rights obligations under the Helsinki accords. Critics said he might not even be able to make such a certification about U.S. compliance.
The scene in Byrd's office as he and Dole spoke with Reagan was moving in its symbolism and comic in its execution. With television cameras hovering overhead, the two leaders sat at a small table talking across thousands of miles with the president about a mutual accomplishment of which all were proud. But one of the phones went dead. As Reagan addressed first one, then the other, Byrd and Dole frantically switched phones so each could hear and respond when spoken to. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) muttered something about wanting to assure people this was not the U.S.-Soviet hotline.
Then, in the almost family way that the Senate operates even at momentous events, they posed for photographs, reaching out at one point to sweep into the tableau a Soviet Embassy attache' who had been monitoring the Senate's deliberations and was standing unobtrusively in the crowd of observers.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty approved by the Senate yesterday would eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons: all land-based Soviet and U.S. missiles with ranges of 300 to 600 miles (shorter-range missiles) and 600 to 3,400 miles (intermediate-range missiles).
INTERMEDIATE -- RANGE MISSILES COVERED
SS4s
Deployed 65
Nondeployed 105
Warheads one per missile
Range 1,250
SS20s
Deployed 405
Nondeployed 245
Warheads three per missile
Range 3,125 miles
SS5s
Deployed 0
Nondeployed six
Warheads one per missile
Range 2,560 miles
SSCX4
Deployed 0
Nondeployed 84
Warheads 1 per missile
Range 1,875 miles
UNITED STATES
Pershing IIs
Deployed 120
Nondeployed 127
Warheads one per missile
Range 1,125 miles
Ground-launched cruise missiles
Deployed 309
Nondeployed 133
Warheads one per GLCM
Range 1,565 miles
SHORTER-RANGE MISSILES COVERED
SOVIET UNION
SS12s
Deployed 220
Nondeployed 506
Warheads one per missile
Range 565 miles
SS23s
Deployed 167
Nondeployed 33
Warheads one per missile
Range 315 miles
UNITED STATES
Pershing IAs
Deployed 0
Nondeployed 170
Warheads one per missile
Range 460 miles
Note: The West German government has agreed to dismantle its 72 Pershing IAs (equipped with U.S. nuclear warheads), after the INF treaty is implemented. The warheads will be withdrawn to the United States.
Pershing IAs
Note: The West German government has agreed to dismantle its 72 Pershing IAs (equipped with U.S. nuclear warheads), after the INF treaty is implemented. The warheads will be withdrawn to the United States.
SOURCES: Center for Defense Information, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency