NATO Agrees to Curb Duplication of Weapons

Foreign ministers of the NATO countries, faced with a financial squeeze on both sides of the Atlantic, approved a plan Thursday that is designed to give the allied armies more weapons for their money by reducing costly duplication.

A senior official of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said the objective is to prevent “wasteful duplicated efforts” like the parallel development in the 1970s of the U.S. M-1 tank and the West German Leopard II tank.

But the official, who asked not to be identified by name, conceded that it will be difficult for the 16 member governments to give up development of some key weapons and buy them instead from allied countries.

“For the bureaucracies to implement these policies is where the difficulty begins,” he said.

Wants New Arms

Nevertheless, a U.S. official said the decision is one of immense importance because NATO hopes to develop a new generation of advanced non-nuclear arms that would make it more capable of turning back an attack by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact nations without resorting to the early use of nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz said the United States will face severe new spending restrictions as a result of enactment of the Gramm-Rudman bill to force the federal government to balance its budget. Other foreign ministers said their nations face similar belt-tightening.

NATO defense ministers approved the plan last month, but the foreign ministers are the alliance’s policy-making body on such issues.

France, a major arms-producing country, is a member of NATO but not of its allied military command; it is represented at foreign ministers’ meetings but not at defense ministers’ meetings.

A statement issued Thursday said the foreign ministers directed NATO’s Conference of National Armaments Directors to work out details of the cooperation.

Call for Cooperation

The conference was told to increase cooperation at every stage of the weapons development process from basic research to final production. In addition, the foreign ministers called for improved cooperation between industries in the various countries.

Cooperation in arms programs has been a NATO objective for years. But the effort has often fallen short because the Pentagon has been reluctant to purchase foreign weaponry and the European members have complained that NATO cooperation was little more than “a euphemism for ‘buy American.’ ”

The U.S. delegation issued a written statement praising the decision and calling attention to other recent international efforts, including agreement by several European nations to develop jointly a jet warplane and the U.S. Army’s decision to buy a French communications system instead of developing one of its own.

Much of the NATO session was devoted to discussion of the status of arms control after the meeting last month in Geneva of President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Steady Policy

According to one participant at the closed-door meeting, Shultz said the keynote of arms control policy is now “steady as we go.”