U.S. Agrees to Tell Soviets of Troop Plans

In a major concession after bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union, the United States agreed that NATO will give notice of troop movements from North America to Europe, diplomats said today.

The move came at the 35-nation European Disarmament Conference, where NATO allies had long resisted Soviet pressure to give such information, arguing that the mandate of the talks was limited to continental Europe only.

The head of the Swedish delegation to the talks, Ambassador Curt Lidgard, told a news conference that the agreement solved one of the most difficult problems at the talks, which are in their final stage.

Major U.S. Move

NATO diplomats said the agreement represented a major move by the United States, which in the past feared that this could open some of the Western alliance’s main naval operations in the Atlantic to foreign inspection and observation.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Charles Redman told reporters the Soviet Union would have to meet Western concerns about inspections of military movements if agreement is to be reached by Sept. 19, when the Stockholm conference ends.

He said a general agreement on some types of military activity in Europe--from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains--had been made possible by a Western agreement on notification of transatlantic troop movements.

But, he said, much remained to be done.

In particular, the conference would have to agree on the number of troops involved in a movement that would trigger the obligation to notify the other side, and to agree on effective inspections on the ground and from the air.

“We call on the Soviet Union and its allies to match our demonstration of flexibility by meeting Western concerns in these areas,” he said.

The Western concession on troop movements was a major one long resisted by Washington, which had refused to include transatlantic troop movements, arguing they were not within Europe.

It meant the West dropped a demand for notification of all troop movements out of garrisons. Redman welcomed Moscow’s agreement to include its own troop movements into Europe from beyond the Urals.

The agreement would basically apply to three countries: the United States, its NATO ally Canada and the Soviet Union. It covers troop transfers from outside Europe into the Continent, and the three are the only ones that do this regularly.

Lidgard said the agreement raised hopes that an overall accord could be worked out in the few remaining weeks of the conference. The Stockholm talks have for almost three years been trying to agree on ways of preventing war from breaking out in Europe by accident.

Long Negotiations

“This is the result of six months of negotiations between the superpowers,” Lidgard said, stressing that some of the most complex issues facing the conference could only be sorted out through direct talks between Moscow and Washington.