Soviets Suggest Focusing on Longer-Range Missiles

The acting chief Soviet negotiator at the nuclear arms control talks here said Friday that Moscow would be willing to make an agreement on eliminating only longer-range intermediate missiles as a means of bypassing a potential impasse.

Alexei A. Obukhov suggested that dealing first with the intermediate missiles that have a range of 600 to 3,000 miles might provide a way around the difficulties created by the U.S. insistence that 72 Pershing 1-A missiles that fall into the shorter range of 300 to 600 miles be allowed to remain in West German hands, with U.S.-controlled nuclear warheads.

“The agreement can be made separately, without the shorter-range missiles,” he said at a news briefing one day after he had formally presented the Soviet proposal to scrap all intermediate-range missiles in both Europe and Asia.

The problem of the 72 Pershings appears to be the chief stumbling block to the new Soviet position, which was first revealed by Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Wednesday.

Both the Soviets and the Americans have reached an agreement in principle that the longer-range weapons should be banned on the ground in Europe. However, the talks were broadened to include those intermediate weapons with the shorter range, which the Soviets would also like to see banned, as would the Reagan Administration.

The Soviets’ new proposal accepts that the elimination of missiles should extend to 100 warheads they would have based in Asia and a like number of American warheads on U.S. territory.

A U.S. official in Geneva, who spoke to the Reuters news agency on condition that he not be identified by name, said of the West German Pershings: “This is a demand which we will not accept. Bilateral negotiations cannot include third-country systems nor affect existing programs of cooperation between the U.S. and its (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies.”

The official added that the Soviets had not objected to the Pershings at two summit meetings between President Reagan and Gorbachev--here in 1985 and in Reykjavik, Iceland, last October.

Max M. Kampelman, the head of the U.S. delegation, recently criticized what he called “11th-hour” Soviet demands to include the Pershings in an accord.

Kampelman, who is still in Washington, said that “because negotiations are bilateral, they cannot cover third-country systems” and “they obviously cannot affect existing patterns of cooperation with our allies, either.”

And Kenneth L. Adelman, director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, said the Reagan Administration will not compromise on its insistence that the Pershing 1-A warheads be exempted.

Carlucci’s View

“I don’t understand why they’re putting this obstacle in the way of an agreement,” said the President’s national security adviser, Frank C. Carlucci. “I see no reason why we would want to change our position.”

But Obukhov argued that “those warheads belong to the United States. They should go. They should be scrapped.”

“We would not mind seeking an LRINF (long-range intermediate nuclear forces) agreement separately,” Obukhov said, “but it has been the Americans who have wanted the double zero--all intermediate-range weapons included in an agreement.”

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union on Friday accused the United States of violating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

A Foreign Ministry statement said the Soviet Union has verified that the United States had set up an “unlawful” warning radar station in Thule, Greenland.

“The Soviet Union views these actions of the U.S. Administration as a direct violation of the timeless Soviet-U.S. treaty on the limitation of anti-ballistic missiles,” the statement said.

In Washington, a State Department spokesman denied that the Thule installation violates the spirit of the treaty, saying that the installation had only been modernized.

In a related development, U.S. Ambassador Jack F. Matlock Jr. met with Anatoly F. Dobrynin, former ambassador to the United States, who is now a top Soviet foreign policy adviser, on the Kremlin’s latest arms proposal, the Tass news agency said.

Tass provided little information on the meeting but said it was requested by Matlock.