Reagan Says Soviets Are Backtracking on Link Between Mid-, Short-Range Arms

President Reagan, accusing the Soviet Union of trying to lock in a monopoly on short-range nuclear forces, said Friday that the United States will never agree to limits on intermediate-range weapons unless Moscow also accepts controls on the short-range systems.

In a written statement, Reagan said that the Soviets are trying to back away from an earlier agreement in principle to limit short-range systems. He said that Moscow’s shift in position--unless reversed--will torpedo efforts to eliminate all medium-range nuclear arms from Europe.

Reagan said that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev agreed during last year’s summit meeting in Iceland that any intermediate-range nuclear force treaty would include restraints on short-range weapons.

New Soviet Position

“In recent weeks, however, the Soviets have backtracked from this position and are now saying that the question of shorter-range (weapons) should be taken out of the current INF (Intermediate Nuclear Force) negotiations and be dealt with instead in separate negotiations,” Reagan said.

“This new Soviet position on shorter-range missiles would allow the Soviet Union a continued monopoly of these systems and would leave them free to increase their existing force,” he said. “This clearly is not acceptable to us or our allies.”

Spokesmen for both nations say that U.S. and Soviet negotiators have come tantalizingly close to agreement on a pact to ban from Europe intermediate-range nuclear missiles--those with ranges between 1,000 and 3,000 miles. The emerging treaty would allow each nation to maintain a maximum of 100 warheads of that class based outside Europe, in Soviet Asia and the United States.

However, the United States insists that the initial treaty include restrictions on short-range nuclear missiles--those with ranges between 300 and 1,000 miles. The United States now has no weapons in this class.

Tactical Missiles

Although Washington is willing to leave some details to be worked out in later negotiations, it insists that a treaty controlling the medium-range weapons include a provision to freeze Soviet deployment of short-range missiles at the current level or less and give the United States the option of introducing that many short-range weapons of its own.

The current negotiations do not cover tactical, or battlefield, nuclear missiles--those with ranges of less than 300 miles. Both nations have such weapons.

In a speech last month, Gorbachev hinted that Moscow might try to separate the two classes of weapons in negotiations. Warsaw Pact foreign ministers, meeting in Moscow earlier this week, made the change official, saying that the Soviet Union would negotiate limits on short-range systems only after an agreement covering the longer-range weapons is reached.

Equal Constraints

“The crucial issue now is whether the Soviet Union is prepared to accept equal constraints on (short-range) missiles in the context of an initial INF agreement, or whether it will insist on maintaining superiority over us in this important area and, with this superiority, the ability to undercut any INF agreement,” Reagan said. “Since the United States obviously cannot permit such an outcome, we will continue to insist that equal constraints on shorter-range . . . missiles must be an integral element of an initial INF treaty.

Reagan said the United States and its allies have made clear since 1981 that constraints on short-range nuclear missiles are essential to an initial INF agreement so that the Soviet Union cannot undercut limitations on medium-range missiles through a buildup in shorter-range missiles. “These constraints therefore must provide the United States with a right to equality” with the global level of deployed Soviet short-range systems, he added.

State Department spokesman Charles Redman said that one method Washington might employ to create its own short-range force would be to reduce the range on its Pershing 2 missiles, now classified as intermediate-range weapons and having a range of a little more than 1,000 miles. The Soviet Union has objected strongly to this proposal.

Moscow is known to consider the Pershing 2 ballistic missile, which could reach in a matter of minutes targets in the Soviet Union from its bases in West Germany, to be the most dangerous of the U.S. intermediate-range weapons.