Slow Progress Seen at Geneva : Prospects Held Better in Other East-West Talks

Despite the pledge at last year’s summit meeting to “accelerate” the superpower talks on nuclear arms, U.S. and Soviet negotiators return to Geneva this week with only a slim prospect of swift progress.

Two months after the November meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, U.S. officials say that two other sets of U.S.-Soviet arms talks may be more likely to fulfill the promise of early new accords between the superpowers.

On the sensitive issue of underground nuclear testing, U.S. officials hint that if the Soviets allow an exchange of scientists to calibrate their detection instruments, the Reagan Administration will consider submitting the long-stalled Threshold Test Ban agreement to Congress for ratification. The treaty, negotiated under President Richard M. Nixon, forbids underground tests in excess of 150 kilotons (150,000 tons of TNT).

And a 35-nation group meeting in Stockholm, the Conference on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe, appears to be moving closer to agreement on improving notification of military maneuvers across the Iron Curtain and on a promise of “no first use of force.”

Although neither of these would have a direct impact on the crucial Geneva talks about offensive nuclear weapons and space defense, success would improve the atmosphere at Geneva as well as increase prospects for a new arms agreement at the Reagan-Gorbachev summit scheduled for Washington later this year.

U.S. officials hope that Soviet diplomats will continue the momentum of the Geneva arms talks by bringing detailed responses to the last U.S. offer on long-range and intermediate-range nuclear weapons, which was made two weeks before last November’s summit.

However, they predict little real movement before the Soviet Communist Party Congress session in late February, which is expected to produce a new five-year plan and significant personnel changes in the new Gorbachev regime.

A measure of the low expectations for the coming round is that Reagan did not meet with the U.S. negotiating team, led by Max M. Kampelman, before some of its members left for Geneva. The full team will be in the Swiss city when the talks resume on Thursday.

Soviets May Mark Time

The consensus here is that Gorbachev has still not focused closely on arms control and foreign policy issues. Until he does, Soviet negotiators from previous regimes will mark time or repeat old views at the bargaining table, U.S. experts believe.

“Gorbachev has shown that when he moves into a situation, he kicks out people and reorganizes the place with anywhere from 30% to 60% of the personnel changing jobs or being retired,” a senior arms control official said. “He hasn’t done that yet in the Foreign Ministry except at the very top,” where Eduard A. Shevardnadze has replaced Andrei A. Gromyko.

In addition, the official said, a new deputy foreign minister has been brought in from the Communist Party’s Central Committee staff within the past month and is expected to recommend a housecleaning of the kind that Gorbachev has already made in agriculture and other domestic sectors of the Soviet government.

Other U.S. officials, while agreeing that early movement at the arms talks is unlikely, focus on the Soviet Defense Ministry as the key barrier to progress.

For the first time in more than a decade, the Soviet military is not represented by a full member on the Kremlin Politburo, an apparent punishment for previous mistakes or for overreaching into non-military fields. The defense minister, Marshal Sergei L. Sokolov, is a soldier rather than a politician and has relatively little influence. He sits as candidate, or non-voting, member of the Politburo, while both the foreign minister and head of the secret police (KGB) are full members.

Status of Soviet Military

These U.S. officials believe Gorbachev will have to resolve the ambiguous status of the military, perhaps by rehabilitating or clearly firing the controversial former chief of staff, Gen. Nikolai V. Ogarkov. Only then, they say, can Gorbachev formulate the details of the radically different Soviet arms control policy heralded in a broad Soviet proposal in October and endorsed in the joint U.S.-Soviet communique at the end of the summit.

That statement said the two leaders “agreed to accelerate the work” of the Geneva arms negotiations and “called for early progress, in particular in areas where there is common ground, including the principle of 50% reductions in (long-range) nuclear arms of the U.S. and U.S.S.R., appropriately applied, as well as the idea of an interim INF (intermediate-range nuclear force) agreement.”

Despite the two areas of common ground, however, the two sides are far apart on specifics. In the communique, the phrase appropriately applied was inserted at U.S. insistence to make clear that the superpowers do not agree on how to achieve a 50% cut in long-range nuclear weapons. The United States, for example, rejects the Soviet demand that such weapons include U.S. bombers that could strike Soviet territory from Europe and from aircraft carriers.

And as for the talks on intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe, the two sides do not concur even on an outline of an accord. The United States proposed equal numbers of U.S. and Soviet warheads, but the Soviets have demanded some compensation for British and French nuclear forces targeted on their territory.

Thus, U.S. officials predict that when the Geneva talks resume, the Soviet negotiators will be limited to probing the last U.S. proposal, made just before the November summit, rather than making a counterproposal that might narrow the gap between the two sides.

Fifth Round in April or May

All that could change, however, after the customary late March recess in the talks. The next round of negotiations--the fifth--will begin in April or May, and they must show progress if the two sides are to reach a new arms agreement when Reagan and Gorbachev meet again after mid-year.

The date for that meeting is not yet fixed--the United States wants it in early summer and the Soviets prefer the fall. White House officials fear that a fall summit would inject U.S.-Soviet relations too deeply into the congressional elections and increase pressure on Reagan to make concessions to reach agreements helpful to Republican candidates.

The State Department, on the other hand, does not strongly object to a September summit. Officials there argue that the added time before that meeting should improve prospects for a meaningful arms accord, such as a broad agreement in principle that might cover both cuts in offensive weapons and some limitation on the pace of space defense work.

Beyond the crucial Geneva talks, the United States and the Soviet Union are showing signs of coming together on nuclear testing, long a sticking point between the superpowers, because the Soviets are growing more amenable toward allowing U.S. observers at their underground test sites. Present treaties prevent all but underground nuclear tests.

Just before year’s end, Gorbachev invited Reagan to join in the unilateral Soviet moratorium on nuclear tests before it ended on Jan. 1. He offered the prospect of exchanging “on-site observers” to monitor any such ban.

Reagan Proposal

Reagan replied that the United States could not agree to a moratorium but proposed that experts from both countries discuss ways to improve monitoring of underground tests. Moscow has yet to reply.

The senior State Department official said that if each side permits the other to calibrate seismic detection equipment at one of its test sites, “the President might ask ratification” of the 1974 Threshold Test Ban agreement before the next summit.

At present, the Administration insists that the Threshold Test Ban agreement’s verification and monitoring provisions are deficient and must be amended before the treaty can be submitted to the Senate. Although each side has pledged to abide by the agreement’s terms as long as the other does, the Administration has charged that the Soviets have “likely” set off tests greater than the 150-kiloton limit.

And in another arena, in Stockholm, the talks on European confidence-building measures and disarmament “may produce the first East-West ‘arms control’ agreements since 1979,” according to James E. Goodby, the former U.S. chief delegate. The second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, still unratified, was signed in 1979.

The Stockholm talks, which aim at “risk reduction” rather than arms reduction, resume Jan. 28. Officials said that under the emerging compromise, the Western allies would agree in principle not to be the first to use force in Europe, a modification of a Soviet proposal for a nuclear-free zone in Europe.

In return, the Soviets would accept all or part of several Western demands, including advance notification of movements of as few as 6,000 troops instead of the present 25,000-troop limit, an exchange of observers to verify key aspects of major maneuvers, and annual forecasts one year in advance of major military exercises.