Europe Troop Reduction Talks Faltering : Warsaw Pact ‘Backtracking’ on Cuts in Forces, NATO Charges

After a few brief months of optimism after the Reagan-Gorbachev summit last November, the 14-year-old negotiations between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact on reducing conventional military forces in Europe are now going backward, officials said Thursday.

As the 429th plenary meeting--the first of the 39th round of the talks--opened here, Canadian Ambassador Michel Shenstone, speaking for the 12 NATO countries, declared that the Warsaw Pact is now “backtracking on certain key points” essential to agreement. He said that “far from building upon opportunities,” the East Bloc negotiators “are only imposing yet other obstacles to progress in Vienna.”

Along with this “backtracking,” alliance delegates here also said that a speech by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev during the talks’ Easter recess effectively signaled an end to any hopes of achieving agreement in this round of the mutual and balanced forces reduction talks.

New Conditions Added

Gorbachev, addressing an East German Communist Party meeting in East Berlin on April 18, in effect smothered the Vienna negotiations by adding new conditions or objectives that, from the NATO viewpoint, would be totally impossible to achieve.

The Soviet leader virtually ignored an offer from the NATO side of limited, first-step, token troop reductions to be accompanied by adequate verification measures for a three-year trial period. Instead, he proposed that the negotiations should be extended to cover all military forces in all of Europe, not just those on the central front alone, and should then include cuts in aircraft, arms and equipment as well as manpower.

“We will have to wait and see whether the other side actually tables any proposals here along the lines of the Gorbachev speech,” said one of the NATO ambassadors, who requested anonymity. “But even without putting anything on the table, Gorbachev is moving away from any serious effort to negotiate an agreement here at all.

“If it stays like this, then I think the NATO side is really going to have to take a hard look later in the year at whether it is going to be worthwhile keeping this negotiation going any longer,” the envoy said.

‘Reduction Zone’

A key point on which the Warsaw Pact side is backtracking on its own proposals concerns verification of any troop reductions. The Soviets say that control points should be established in both the East and West through which troops would pass and be checked when they are withdrawn from the “reduction zone” of the central front.

But this control process would only apply to the few thousand or so troops leaving the area, and would not apply to troops being rotated or replaced. NATO delegates say this would make a mockery of the verification process.

Between the Gorbachev speech and the backtracking on verification proposals, the signals from the Soviet side indicate they are against ever reaching any agreement, the NATO officials say.

For now, however, NATO does hold the propaganda and diplomatic advantage, with its simple proposal for trial period of token troop reductions and a manpower freeze with workable and believable verification measures.

“When the last round ended, the West still awaited not only a constructive response to its proposals but answers to a number of straightforward questions on the East’s verification proposals,” Shenstone told the plenary meeting of the 19 participants in the negotiation at the Hofburg Palace. “This is where we left off and that is where we still are at the start of this, the 39th round.”