NATO Aiming for Conventional Arms Plan That Soviets Could Accept

The United States and its Western allies are consulting on new proposals to reduce conventional arms, and the West German government believes that agreement can be reached by this summer.

U.S. and German diplomats, in disclosing these new consultations Tuesday, said there is a determined effort under way by the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to correct the imbalance in conventional forces between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact powers.

The consultations, which cover a wide range of ideas on limiting conventional weapons and troop levels in Europe, are aimed at finding “realistic” concepts that the Soviets can accept, one source said.

Some Concessions Seen

Among other things, the Warsaw Pact powers would be called on to make asymmetrical reductions in their forces--reductions deeper than what the NATO countries would make. But the West would be willing to make concessions in some critical areas, the sources said.

They said that some senior officers are reluctant to make dramatic reductions in conventional arms just now but that NATO diplomatic planners think the time is opportune for concessions to be made on both sides.

The new approach is considered highly important, diplomatic and military sources said, because reducing the disparity in conventional forces would enhance East-West security and hasten the reduction of nuclear weapons.

A lower level of short-range nuclear arms in Europe would have wide public appeal in most European countries, particularly West Germany.

A U.S. official emphasized that reductions must be asymmetrical, that the Warsaw Pact forces--the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania--must cut back much more than the West because they have larger forces.

“Otherwise,” he said, “we would be worse off than before. NATO forces are already stretched very thin across the Central Front, and if both sides reduced troops and weapons by the same amount, we would have great gaps in our defense. We should remember that the reason for introducing nuclear weapons into Europe was to correct NATO’s inferiority in conventional arms.”

Senior Soviet officials, in statements issued recently in Moscow, have agreed with the principle of asymmetry. But they have not indicated how far they might be willing to go in this direction.

A recent RAND Corp. study argued that because of geographic and other considerations, the Soviets should reduce their heavy weapons, essentially tanks and artillery, by a far greater proportion than NATO--perhaps by a 7-to-1 ratio. But U.S. diplomats say the Soviets might be more likely to accept a 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 formula.

U.S. experts admit that conventional arms negotiations are extremely difficult because they deal with so many facets of disarmament, demobilization and deployment.

Further, a U.S. diplomat said, Washington must be prepared to offer the Soviets some form of conventional arms reduction in return, possibly a reduction in the number of strike aircraft, in which the United States holds an advantage.

One U.S. expert here said: “I think an agreement can ultimately be struck. An important factor is that the economies of both sides need to decrease conventional defense spending.”

East-West talks on reducing conventional arms--the mutual and balanced force reduction talks--have been going on in Vienna for more than 15 years but have produced no real results.

“The negotiations were sterile because we focused on the wrong index of military capability, that is, manpower,” the senior U.S. official here said. “What we should be doing is reducing the invasion capability, and that means the Soviets have to take out far larger armored formations.”

The Soviet Union could attack anywhere around its long perimeter, but Western strategists have assumed the most critical defense area to be NATO’s so-called Central Front--the East-West frontier that extends from Denmark to Austria.

This is the most highly militarized area in the world, with about 2 million soldiers poised on both sides of what would be the front line. And it is the area where most of the troops and heavy weapons, on both sides, are concentrated.

Although estimates of Central Front forces vary, depending on what is factored into the equation, one recent authoritative report lists 790,000 NATO troops--including 50,000 French servicemen in West Germany--and 960,000 troops of the Warsaw Pact forces in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

In the critical category of heavy weapons, NATO is outnumbered in main battle tanks by a margin of 2.14 to 1, while the artillery imbalance is even greater, 3 to 1 in favor of the East Bloc.

In the tactical aircraft category, the Warsaw Pact is believed to have 2,650 planes against the West’s 1,250.

Some analysts suggest that the forces of some East Bloc countries might not be reliable in case of war, and that therefore the figures are misleading.

“That may be true,” a NATO specialist said, “but we don’t really know, and we’d be foolish to count on their defecting.”

The West German army constitutes the greater part of the NATO forces on the Central Front, and German formations are interspersed with those of the United States, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Some experts say that NATO could cheaply increase its defenses by building fortifications along the West German border: dunes and trenches to serve as tank barriers, underground pipelines filled with liquid explosives, deep mine fields that could slow a surprise attack.

“Unfortunately,” a diplomat here commented, “that is not feasible--environmentally, or, much more important, politically. The West Germans take the position that Germany, East and West, should not be divided, so there will be no barriers, no matter what military strategy might suggest.”

Massive Surprise Attack

And despite the array of new intelligence devices, Western ground officers say that the Soviets, under the guise of maneuvers, could quickly mount a surprise attack with overwhelming forces at a soft point along the East German-West German border before NATO units could be rallied.

It was to reduce this disparity in conventional forces that nuclear weapons were introduced into Europe. According to NATO’s “flexible response” doctrine, tactical nuclear weapons could be used against attacking enemy formations, wiping them out or disrupting them with a single atomic shell.

Increasingly, however, that doctrine has been questioned, particularly by the West Germans, who realize that any use of tactical nuclear weapons would be on German soil. Like Vietnamese villagers during the 1968 Tet offensive, they could not be expected to accept the explanation that “we had to destroy the town in order to save it.”

NATO strategists and Western politicians put considerable emphasis on reaching some kind of realistic agreement on reducing conventional forces that would deter the Soviet Union from a ground attack and preclude the need for using nuclear weapons in Europe.

Some strategists believe that the Soviet Union would never expose its own cities to the threat of nuclear retaliation by starting a conventional war in Western Europe. But, at the same time, most analysts believe that a long-term goal of the Soviet Union is to “decouple” Europe from the United States, shifting the Continent into a neutralist stance, something like that of the Soviet Union’s northern neighbor, Finland.

Finland Position

“What Mikhail Gorbachev wants,” one senior Western officer here said, “is to have the same position with Western Europe that he has with Finland, but he is too sophisticated to say it.”

A NATO specialist in ground warfare, referring to the agreement signed recently in Washington on eliminating ground-launched intermediate-range missiles, observed, “The Soviets may be giving away about 5% of their nuclear armory, but they have yet to destroy a single rifle.”

As for the suggestion that Gorbachev is intent on seeking military detente, a military official declared: “Politicians can possibly divine the enemy’s intentions, but military men must worry about capabilities. Russian leadership and policies change. History teaches us to defend ourselves against capabilities. That’s why we need conventional strength. That’s why we have nuclear weapons. That’s what deterrence is all about.”

Britain’s Lord Carrington, the secretary general of NATO, put it in another way: “If there is an elephant in your neighbor’s garden, there is much to be said for studying its intentions. But however friendly you may think it to be, there is equally much to be said for having a stout fence to protect your flower beds.”