East, West Still in Standoff, Recess Talks on Troop Cuts

The 36th round in the East-West negotiations on military force reductions in Central Europe recessed Thursday with agreement apparently about as far away as it was when the talks began in 1973.

But there was speculation on both sides that a meeting of President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, scheduled for November in Geneva, will provide new momentum for the talks here between representatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact powers.

Soviet spokesman Nikolai Neiland, appearing at a news conference after the 422nd plenary meeting of what has become the longest continuous diplomatic negotiation since the Treaty of Utrecht talks in the 18th Century, said:

“We hope there will be a discussion of Vienna at Geneva. It is just a hope at this stage, because nothing has yet been decided. But it would be stupid to exclude (the possibility) that Geneva will give some sort of impulse to the talks here.”

Somewhat more cautiously, Ambassador Jan Hein van de Mortel of the Netherlands, acting as spokesman for the NATO countries, said, “We are all awaiting preparations going on in the two capitals, but we envisage that all important issues of arms control are to be discussed at the summit meeting.”

Neiland criticized the United States in particular and NATO in general for “reiteration of biased and unrealistic positions that do not offer a way out of the deadlock.”

In much the same vein, Van de Mortel asserted that “to a disappointing degree we have encountered tactics that can be described variously as ‘my way or no way,’ or ‘take it or leave it.’ ”

Both spokesman agreed that there was no visible progress at all in this round of talks.

Tactical Advantage

For the moment, the East Bloc appears to have a tactical advantage, since the NATO governments have not formally responded to a proposal for interim reductions of ground forces advanced by the Soviet Union in February. This calls for withdrawal of 10,000 American soldiers and 13,000 Soviet soldiers as a first stage, plus a freeze on the remaining men and weapons, even tanks and trucks.

A Western reply is making its way through the NATO machinery. The difficulty, according to sources here, is not in figuring out what is wrong with the Soviet proposal but in trying to come up with a counterproposal that would move things forward.