New U.S. Arms Offer ‘Glaring’ Failure, Soviet Analyst Says

The Tass news agency said Wednesday that new U.S. proposals at the Geneva arms talks are a “glaring” failure and that the American package is intended to derail the negotiations by drawing a Soviet rejection.

The brushoff came in a dispatch by senior analyst Vladimir I. Chernyshev and followed the first round of talks on long-range nuclear weapons since the new American plan was announced.

U.S. officials said the proposals are aimed at building on agreements in principle reached in Reykjavik, Iceland, by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

But Tass said they distort the progress achieved at the two-day summit.

U.S. officials have said that U.S. negotiators in Geneva were told to present new proposals calling principally for liquidation of all U.S. and Soviet ballistic missiles by 1996, for 50% cuts in other strategic nuclear weapons and for removal of all intermediate-range missiles from Europe.

In Geneva, U.S. and Soviet negotiators on long-range nuclear weapons met for 2 hours and 55 minutes at the Soviet Mission on Wednesday, a U.S. statement said. Under an agreement by both sides, no details were given. Alexei A. Obukhov led the Soviet side and Ronald F. Lehman led the Americans.

Reagan’s arms cut package was transmitted to U.S. chief negotiator Max M. Kampelman on Monday night, Washington officials said Tuesday.

Chernyshev quoted White House spokesman Larry Speakes as saying the United States intended the proposals to lend impetus to the Geneva talks on the basis of the Iceland summit.

“These statements sound serious enough and could be viewed with optimism if the instructions to the U.S. delegation, first, were really based on the foundation laid in Reykjavik,” Chernyshev said.

“Yet, in reality, things, regrettably, are very different. To begin with, the U.S. delegation has been instructed to press ahead at the talks with a distorted rather than true accord on nuclear armaments that has been reached in Iceland.”

Chernyshev repeated Kremlin allegations that Reagan agreed in Reykjavik to eliminate all strategic nuclear weapons, not just ballistic missiles. (U.S. officials have said the President merely discussed the possible elimination of all strategic weapons.)

Chernyshev said U.S. military leaders did not object to the new Geneva proposals “because the Soviet Union would turn them down anyway.”

“Are not the authors of the ‘instructions’ to the U.S. negotiating team in Geneva merely going to thwart the talks, which are intended to complete constructively what was started in Reykjavik,” he said.

“That is the impression one is getting, because the untenability of the ‘new’ American stand is glaring,” Chernyshev said.

Echoing recent Kremlin commentary on the Iceland summit, Chernyshev said the U.S. space weapons program is causing a “deadlock . . . in the entire process of nuclear disarmament.”

Since Reykjavik, Gorbachev and other Soviet officials have said that an agreement reducing nuclear weapons is impossible until the space weapons dispute is resolved.