Offers ‘Cobbled Together’ : U.S. Aides Still Trying to Untangle Summit Results

Senior Administration officials, emerging from the hectic pace of arms negotiations in Iceland, disagreed sharply Tuesday on the critical question of just what nuclear weapons were covered in President Reagan’s last offer to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

And the President’s offer to eliminate many--or perhaps all--long-range nuclear weapons in 10 years was made without consulting the nation’s top military leaders, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The latter would “have had heartburn,” conceded White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan, if the Soviets had accepted.

Although Reagan and a host of Administration officials insist that the Iceland summit yielded a solid basis for future progress on arms control, increasing evidence of confusion and disarray among U.S. negotiators at Reykjavik suggests another possibility.

U.S. officials may have to negotiate among themselves on precisely what they proposed and the Soviets accepted before they can try to hold Gorbachev to the concessions that the Soviets made before the summit failed.

“It all sounds cobbled together at the last minute, a never-never land of proposals and counterproposals,” one former U.S. arms negotiator said. “Nothing like that has ever happened before.”

“Unreal,” said an expert on U.S.-Soviet relations. “Just unreal.”

The confusion on the part of U.S. negotiators also raises questions about their descriptions of exactly what was included in the Soviet proposals, precisely when the latter were made and whether they were as unreasonable as U.S. officials have complained.

The U.S. position during the final frenzied hours at Reykjavik, American officials said Tuesday, will become the basis for new proposals that will be given to the Soviets. But first, the American officials will have to agree on exactly what they offered the Soviets at the Icelandic capital.

The Soviet Union insisted there that nuclear arms reductions be linked to strict limits on the Administration’s proposed “Star Wars” anti-missile program, a demand that Reagan rejected.

In a breakfast interview at The Times’ Washington Bureau, Regan said that the President proposed to rid the world of “everything--strategic offensive (nuclear) arms and ballistic missiles, in the actual phrase used.” Included were ballistic missiles, bombs, bombers, cruise missiles, short-range tactical missiles, even nuclear artillery shells, he said.

But John M. Poindexter, the President’s national security adviser, and Assistant Defense Secretary Richard N. Perle specifically contradicted him. They said that bombers and winged cruise missiles were excluded from the plan.

“The American proposal was focused on offensive ballistic missiles,” Perle said. “One would still have tactical nuclear forces (fighter-bombers) and . . . bomber forces.”

Other Three Powers

Either way, the U.S. plan did not address what some U.S. negotiators regarded as a significant problem--that France, Britain and China would possess the world’s only nuclear ballistic missiles if the United States and the Soviet Union were to destroy theirs.

“We’d have to talk to the British and the French and the Chinese” about giving up their weapons, Perle said. He added that the plan to eliminate missiles had not been subject to “the usual analysis” by the Joint Chiefs for its military impact.

But if Perle and Poindexter agreed on this point, they clashed over the reason that the Soviets insisted on restricting U.S. work on its Strategic Defense Initiative, the formal name for “Star Wars,” to laboratory research.

Perle suggested that the Soviets have found “a potential for using weapons in space offensively that we haven’t discovered” and now want to kill SDI to prevent U.S. scientists from discovering it, too. “They may know something we don’t know,” he said, “but they’re not saying what it is.”

But Poindexter, in a news briefing of his own, seemed to shoot down that explanation.

Before the Reykjavik meeting, he said, the Soviets expressed fear that SDI might result in space-based weapons that could hit targets on Earth as well as missiles and satellites in space. But U.S. scientists have concluded that space-based weapons would be too costly for such use, Poindexter said.

‘Uncomfortable With Prospects’

“We spent a lot of time looking at that (possibility, but) the physics of the matter don’t make that a realistic threat,” he said. “With a space-based laser, you can’t get enough energy down through the atmosphere to the Earth to cause massive destruction. Even with the largest type of laser that we’ve thought about, it would take something like a week to burn a city block.”

Perle, known as a hard-liner with strong anti-Communist views, also argued that the Soviets used SDI as an excuse to break up the Iceland talks because they were “uncomfortable with the prospects of eliminating all offensive missiles.”