Force Reduction Talks Enter 15th Year With Proposal to Start Over

A 15th and probably final year of the East-West negotiations on mutual and balanced force reductions in Central Europe opened Thursday with both sides marking time and calling on the other to take a first step.

But the delegations from seven Warsaw Pact countries and 12 countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will probably not have to go on making the same speeches for much longer. Both sides have agreed that the time has come to bring these drawn-out negotiations to an end--as soon as they can agree on a new forum to replace it.

Sometime in the next two weeks, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, the Western powers expect to complete a formal proposal to the Warsaw Pact countries to start over again, with three basic changes in view:

--Instead of being limited to negotiating military force reductions on Europe’s Central Front in Germany, the new negotiations would have the more generalized mandate of discussing “conventional stability in the whole of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.”

--Participants would include all the NATO powers, most importantly the French, who have steadfastly refused to have anything to do with the force-reduction talks since they began in January of 1973.

--The new talks, including the 16 Atlantic Alliance nations and the seven Warsaw Pact powers, will probably be held in Geneva, where most countries already have disarmament delegations at the U.N. offices.

When the two sides first sat down in Vienna in 1973, it took five months to negotiate an agreement on what they were then going to negotiate. Thus it will likely take most of 1987 to work out a mandate for a new conference.

In the meantime, the force reduction talks will continue. Both sides used almost identical language Thursday in urging that even minimal agreement now would be a good omen for enlarged negotiations later.

Bigger Task Ahead

British Ambassador Robin O’Neill, speaking on behalf of the NATO countries, told the meeting: “The task before us is modest compared with that which governments are now setting themselves in a wider geographical area. But it is nevertheless a vital one in the process of conventional arms control. The problems which confront the sides in this negotiation will not disappear in a new forum.”

On Dec. 5, 1985, the West proposed that the United States pull out 5,000 men and the Soviet Union 11,500 as “token withdrawals” for a three-year trial period under a system of inspection and verification to establish the feasibility of larger withdrawals.

At Thursday’s meeting, Soviet Ambassador Valerian Mikhailov dismissed the Western proposal as meaningless. He said it does not open the way to an agreement, and he called for a “simple agreement” to cut troops without verification measures.

“We wish to have a positive result to lead to a better climate for talks on an all-European scale,” he said.