NATO Secretary Predicts U.S.-Soviet Give-and-Take

NATO Secretary General Lord Carrington said after a meeting with President Reagan today that the stage is set for a “give-and-take” between the superpowers on arms control.

Carrington said not even the Kremlin could have “expected for one moment” that the arms control proposal announced last week by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev would be accepted by the West “out of hand.”

But, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization chief told reporters, “certainly it was very welcome that those proposals were put on the table. It’s been a very long time since there have been any concrete proposals by the Soviet Union which go into the details that those proposals have gone into.”

However, he said, “in the long bargaining process, you have to give and take, and I imagine both sides will give and take in the process of the negotiations.”

Carrington, a former British foreign secretary, spoke to reporters at the State Department after meetings with Reagan at the White House and with Secretary of State George P. Shultz at the department. Later, he was seeing Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger as part of his 10-day U.S. visit.

Gorbachev, during a state visit to France, announced Thursday that the Soviet Union was proposing a 50% reduction in nuclear arms if Reagan agreed to abandon his “Star Wars” missile-defense program.

He also offered to negotiate separately with the British and French for reductions in their nuclear arsenals, a move seen as an attempt to divide the United States from its European allies.

Carrington said the seriousness of the Soviet proposals will be judged when U.S. and Soviet negotiators “get down to the negotiating” at arms control talks in Geneva, adding that the Nov. 19-20 summit between Reagan and Gorbachev can give the talks “a push in the right direction.”