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OCR Page 1 of 10UNCLASSIFIED
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By contrast, I noted with regret that the Soviet Union had
repeatedly violated some of its arms control obligations. My
reports to the Congress over the past three years on Soviet
noncompliance enumerate and document in detail our serious
concerns about Soviet violations of the SALT II, and other arms
control agreements, including the ABM Treaty, the SALT I Interim
Agreement, and the Biological Weapons Convention and the 1925
Geneva Protocol. The overall judgment I reached in June, 1985,
was that while the Soviets had observed some provisions of
existing arms control agreements, they had violated important
elements of those agreements and associated political
commitments.
In June, I noted that these are very crucial issues, for to
be serious about effective arms control is to be serious about
compliance. The pattern of Soviet violations increasingly
affects our national security. But, perhaps even more
significant than the near-term military consequences of the
violations themselves, they raise fundamental concerns about the
integrity of the arms control process, concerns that, if
uncorrected, undercut the integrity and viability of arms control
as an instrument to assist in ensuring a secure and stable future
world.
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I also noted that the United States had raised our serious
concerns with the Soviet Union many times in diplomatic channels,
including the US/Soviet Standing Consultative Commission.
Unfortunately, despite long and repeated U.S. efforts to resolve
these issues, my assessment was that the Soviet Union had neither
provided satisfactory explanations nor undertaken corrective
action. Instead, Soviet violations had expanded as they
continued to modernize their strategic forces. Consequently, in
that June assessment I was forced to conclude that the Soviet
Union was not exercising the equal restraint upon which our
policy had been conditioned, and that such Soviet behavior was
fundamentally inimical to the future of arms control and to the
security of this country and that of our allies.
At the same time, given our goal of reducing the size of
nuclear arsenals, I made the judgment that it remained in the
interest of the United States and its allies to try to establish
an interim framework of truly mutual restraint on strategic
offensive arms as we pursued with renewed vigor our goal of real
reductions in the size of existing nuclear arsenals through the
ongoing negotiations in Geneva. However, the U.S. cannot
establish such a framework alone. It requires the Soviet Union
to take the positive, concrete steps to correct its
noncompliance, resolve our other compliance concerns, and reverse
or substantially reduce its unparalleled and unwarranted military
build-up. While the Soviet Union had not demonstrated a
willingness to move in this direction, in the interest of
ensuring that every opportunity to establish the secure, stable
future we seek is fully explored, I announced that I was prepared
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