Soviet inspectors and American escorts jogging in the evening at Marshall, Texas.









General Parker, Director, OSIA, prepares to offer a toast at a dinner at Kapustin Yar, USSR, in May 1991.

Soviet and American inspectors and escorts discuss the final SS-20 elimination at Kapustin Yar, USSR.









Soviet Colonel Kuznetsov (c.) holds a child during a visit to a scout troop at Magna, Utah.

 

"We can now look forward to eliminating other nuclear weapons...."

General Medvedev










Ambassador Ronald F. Lehman, Director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, threw the switch which ignited the final Pershing II rocket motor.

  Major General Robert W. Parker, USAF, who became the director of OSIA in January 1991, said that there had been 17 elimination inspections at Davis-Monthan, and "each has been successful. . .each complied with the treaty."14 General Medvedev, Director of the USSR's Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, responded that the Soviet Union and the United States had eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. "We can now look forward," General Medvedev concluded, "to eliminating other nuclear weapons, and we have created a good premise for that."15

Five days after this final GLCM elimination in Arizona, the United States destroyed its last Pershing II missile stages in Texas on May 6, 1991. A large team of 18 Soviet inspectors flew into Washington, D.C., on Saturday, May 4. Led by Colonel V.V. Yevdokimov, the Soviet team was escorted to Texas by Major Freddie L. Price, USAF, and an experienced American INF escort team. Because this was the final American elimination of an INF missile system, a formal, public ceremony was held at the Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant. It was attended by several hundred people, including American and Soviet dignitaries, agency personnel, plant employees, soldiers from Pershing regiments, journalists, and the public. In his remarks just before the destruction of the final nine-ton Pershing II first-stage rocket motor, Ambassador Ronald F. Lehman, Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, said, "The INF treaty has set high standards for arms control achievement and has opened doors for the political changes necessary to address the causes rather than the symptoms of conflict."16

 

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