Hopes for Force Reduction Talks Fading

The 39th round of the 13-year-old East-West talks on conventional force reductions in Central Europe ended here Thursday, with senior NATO ambassadors saying they are convinced that the Soviet Union no longer wants to negotiate any agreement and instead is maneuvering to have the talks killed off entirely.

This unanimous and negative assessment in background discussions with several ambassadors was quickly borne out at a wind-up news conference given by Soviet Ambassador Valerian Mikhailov after the final plenary meeting of the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks.

Such appearances by the head of the Soviet delegation have been rare in these Vienna meetings, and other delegates said Mikhailov was acting on direct instructions from Moscow.

Mikhailov began by reading a statement denouncing in uncompromising language the Western proposal of last December for “small-step” first reductions of 11,500 Soviet troops and 5,000 U.S. troops for a trial three-year period to see if such reductions could be satisfactorily verified.

‘Insignificant Reductions’

The ambassador scornfully dismissed the West’s proposal as “bringing everything down to insignificant reductions in manpower levels only, with verification measures that would result in an unjustified exposure of the entire defense structure of states and in serious interference in the internal affairs of states not at all called for by the requirements of the proposed agreement.”

He went on then to extol the East Bloc’s own “Budapest appeal,” made three weeks ago, calling for reductions of 100,000 to 150,000 in military manpower on both sides, East and West, along with big cuts in armaments and aircraft, across the whole of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.

Asked where such a proposal would be discussed, Mikhailov said the Soviet Union “was prepared to see the mandate of the Vienna talks revised” to cover all of Europe instead of only the central front, and to include other states such as France, Spain and Portugal which are not participating in the present talks.

Another solution, he said, would be to take up the Budapest proposals in the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is currently holding a long-stagnant meeting in Stockholm on military confidence-building measures and is due to begin a general review conference here in November.

Entirely New Conference

The ambassador said a third solution would be to convene an entirely new conference just to talk about “large-scale reduction of armed forces and conventional armaments in the whole of Europe, including tactical air force and operational tactical nuclear systems.”

These Soviet proposals, as one North Atlantic Treaty Organization ambassador put it, “are reminiscent of those sweeping propaganda plays we used to get in Geneva back in the 1950s and 1960s for general and complete disarmament.”

Hopes have never been very high for this long-running negotiation, but neither has the dead end ever looked like such a concrete wall before.

“There is really only one valid conclusion to be drawn from their sweeping and impossible Budapest proposals and their open talk about changing the Vienna mandate--and that is that, for all practical purposes, the MBFR negotiations are finished,” one ambassador said. “The question is, what do we do and how do we respond?”

At the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Halifax, Canada, at the end of May, a group of high-level experts was established at the unusual initiative of the French to study “dynamic new moves” in both Vienna and Stockholm. The group held its first meeting in Brussels at the end of June and another is scheduled for late July; but the real question they now face is how to deal with a set of talks that is dead.