A divided Federal arbitration panel announced today that the Government must pay the heirs of Abraham Zapruder $16 million for his film of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, the highest price ever paid for a historical American artifact.

The award for the quarter-inch-wide, six-foot long strip of film that experts said was too fragile to safely run through a projector cannot be appealed. The Government acquired Mr. Zapruder's 26-second film last year under a Federal law enacted in 1992 that requires all records of the Kennedy assassination to be transferred to the National Archives for preservation, research and other noncommercial purposes.

Today, two of the panel's three members, Arlin M. Adams and Kenneth R. Feinberg, wrote in their majority decision that the film made by Mr. Zapruder, as the Kennedy motorocade rolled through Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, was ''a unique historical item of unprecedented worth.'' A third member of the panel, Walter E. Dellinger, dissented. He said that the price set by the majority ''was simply too large an amount in light of the evidence in the record.''

Mr. Dellinger said that an award of $3 million to $5 million would have been more realistic. He said that since the Zapruder family already controlled the licensing of images on the film, the only issue was the value of the original film strip as a collectible object. Mr. Dellinger said there had been no documented sales of any other historically significant original film strips, a finding which he said, ''strongly suggests that a camera original ordinarily has little independent value.''