Moscow Offers to Curtail Missile Deployment in Asia

The Soviet Union has told the United States it is willing, in an effort to reach an interim arms agreement, to freeze its deployment of medium-range missiles in the Far East and split the question of intermediate-range weapons away from that of long-range missiles and space defense, a presidential adviser said Wednesday.

Paul H. Nitze, White House arms control adviser, described the Soviet plan as “quite a different initial formula.” He said that eventually it would fuse with their original basic proposals, “which would result in zero for us and a large number for them, and a growing number for them in medium-range systems.”

Nitze discussed the proposal, presented to U.S. negotiators in Geneva last week, at a meeting with reporters.

The proposal follows a series of shifts in the Soviet position on medium-range nuclear weapons, one of the three categories--along with long-range, or strategic, weapons, and space-based systems--on which the two superpowers are focusing in the recently resumed arms control talks.

Public Relations Offensive

In addition, in what U.S. officials have viewed as a public relations offensive, the Soviets have advanced new proposals calling for a 50% reduction in long-range weaponry, producing what has been a flurry of arms control discussion in advance of the Nov. 19-20 summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

U.S. officials have objected to the long-range weapons proposal, asserting that the Soviets would not include their European-based medium-range SS-20s because those weapons could not reach the United States, while it would include American weapons of similar range in Europe--because they would be able to reach Soviet territory.

When the Geneva arms control talks resumed earlier this year, the Soviets insisted on linking the three sets of weapons negotiations, apparently in a determined effort to halt U.S. work on the “Star Wars” program to develop a space-based defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles. The program is formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Key Point of Dispute

One of the key points of dispute regarding medium-range missile deployment has been the role British and French weapons will play as the two sides count each others forces.

Moscow’s “basic position,” Nitze said, “is that they should be entitled to a number of SS-20s, or comparable systems, in Europe equal to the aggregate of what the British and the French have on their submarines.”

“In the Far East, their basic position is that they should be unlimited,” said Nitze.

“Now they have . . . said they are prepared to separate an interim INF (intermediate nuclear force) agreement from linkage to a solution to the START (strategic arms reduction talks) question and a solution to the defense in space system, and in that interim agreement they are for the time being prepared to merely have a freeze . . . on U.S. deployment,” Nitze said.

He said that later reductions would “take account of compensation for the British and French systems.”

“They coupled that with a freeze in the Far East on the SS-20s they have,” he said.

The Soviets, according to U.S. officials, have deployed a total of more than 400 of the three-warhead SS-20s in Europe, where they face the North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, and in Asia. However, the weapons are mobile, and those placed east of the Ural Mountains can be moved rapidly west to threaten Europe.