NATO Seeking Wider Talks on Cuts in Forces

The foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization decided Thursday to propose a large-scale new round of talks with the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies aimed at achieving major, balanced cutbacks in conventional forces everywhere on the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains.

The initiative, contained in a “Brussels Declaration on Conventional Force Reduction,” could result in negotiations that would replace talks in Vienna on limitation of conventional forces in Central Europe. These negotiations remain stalemated after 13 years.

Agreement on the declaration ended a long procedural deadlock between the United States and France, clearing the way for NATO to present the new proposal to the Soviet Union early next year.

Objective Is Parity

European foreign ministers said their objective is to reach parity in conventional arms between NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact before the United States and Moscow agree on deep cuts in the nuclear forces on both sides.

The Europeans have expressed concern that the sort of nuclear arms pact discussed by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev at their Iceland summit would leave Western Europe at the mercy of superior Soviet conventional forces.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials predicted that Moscow would agree to substitute the proposed new round of talks for the moribund talks on Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction that have dragged on in Vienna since 1973.

U.S. officials said that NATO has not yet adopted its substantive position for the new talks. But they expressed relief that the Washington-Paris differences have been papered over. France, which refused to join the Vienna talks, agreed to participate in the new round.

Document a ‘Bridge’

“I think the document means a lot more than a lot of people think--it gives us a bridge to move forward on procedural matters,” a senior U.S. official said.

The only discordant note on the first day of a two-day NATO foreign ministers meeting occurred when Spanish Foreign Minister Francisco Fernandez Ordonez warned Secretary of State George P. Shultz that unless Washington agrees to substantial reductions in American forces based in Spain, Madrid will refuse to consider renewal of its bases agreement with Washington.

Fernandez Ordonez said, “We will not start negotiations over the future agreement--if there is to be a future agreement--if there is not a previous agreement on reduction” of the 9,000 U.S. troops stationed at four bases in Spain. He indicated that Madrid would like to see one or two of the bases closed.

A U.S. official said, “This kind of negotiations is always expected to be difficult. . . . We expect to continue to work for an agreement that satisfies both sides.”

The present agreement runs through May, 1988, but under its terms either side can decide to renounce it up to six months before the expiration date. Fernandez Ordonez said that Spain would cancel the pact next November if the United States had not agreed to a satisfactory troop cut before that.

Although a senior U.S. official said the NATO ministers, during their closed meeting, expressed general support for the sort of deep cuts in nuclear weapons that Reagan and Gorbachev considered at Reykjavik, some of the Europeans expressed nervousness in their public comments.

“Reykjavik made it evident how Europe, a vulnerable peninsula on the edge of the Asian continent, would be at risk if its defense became dependent upon conventional forces alone,” said Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti in his role as president of the meeting.

NATO clearly hopes to reduce that risk through the proposed new round of conventional arms talks.

Pentagon Domination Charged

The deadlocked Vienna talks, which covered only a narrow slice of Central Europe, have been between NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw pact. France, which long ago withdrew from NATO’s military structure although it continues to be a political member of the alliance, refused to participate at Vienna because it said the NATO position was dominated by the Pentagon.

France wanted to conduct conventional arms talks as part of the existing European security conference that started with the Helsinki talks of 1975. But Washington objected to that forum because it can make decisions only by unanimous approval of the 35 member nations. That would give a veto over arms agreements to such tiny and lightly armed states as Malta and the Vatican.

Under the compromise agreement that paved the way for the Brussels Declaration, the new talks would include only the 16 NATO and seven Warsaw Pact nations, but they would attend as individual countries and not as members of the two blocs.

Wider, More Complex

With 23 nations participating in negotiations covering all of Europe, the issues are expected to be far wider and more complex than the ones that prevented the Vienna talks from producing even token force reductions on a limited front in Central Europe.

The initiative for enlarging the negotiations came first from the Warsaw Pact. The NATO ministers, after a six-month study by a special high-level group, decided that it is better diplomacy and politics to go along with an enlarged forum, rather than stick to the Vienna negotiations forever.

The Brussels Declaration is NATO’s response to a Warsaw Pact “Budapest Declaration,” issued last April, in which disarmament from the Atlantic to the Urals was formally proposed as part of Gorbachev’s new-look diplomacy.