Soviets Still a Formidable Foe, NATO Ministers Warn

Atlantic Alliance foreign ministers, concerned that the friendly tone of the recent Moscow summit meeting may cause the West to let down its guard, warned Thursday that the Soviet Union remains a formidable military power despite its less threatening rhetoric.

“Everyone is alert to the danger of euphoria,” a senior U.S. official told reporters after the first day of the regular two-day meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s main political council.

He said that some European foreign ministers privately expressed concern about the impact of the latest relaxation of East-West tension on public support for NATO’s military programs.

In effect, the official said, the Europeans share the U.S. view that the alliance must not be lulled to sleep, but some said public opinion in their countries might not agree.

Lord Carrington of Britain, who is to step down as NATO secretary general at the end of this month, warned of Soviet military activities in a speech to a brief public session before the ministers went behind closed doors.

“Whatever else may have changed in the Soviet Union,” he said, “the military machine is still, so far, operating at exactly the same level as it was in the days before perestroika and glasnost “ -- Russian words that characterize Gorbachev’s policies of reform and openness.

The meeting shapes up as one of the most harmonious in years for the 15-nation alliance. With few controversial topics on the agenda, the foreign ministers have concentrated on the situation in Eastern Europe, exchanging ideas about how the Western democracies should react to political ferment in the Communist East.

Consensus in Eastern Europe

The senior U.S. official said there was a consensus that Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other East Bloc countries will be unable to reform their economies, as most have said they hope to do, unless they change their political systems.

Another U.S. official said that the United States would call on its allies to deny credits and other forms of economic assistance to Eastern European nations unless they move first to open their political processes.

“It is clear you should not make loans with the expectation that reform would come afterward,” this official said. “Reform should be up front.”

European leaders, briefing reporters from their countries, took a softer approach. According to reporters who attended these briefings, most of the Europeans suggested that the West should consider loans and other economic assistance to Eastern Europe to encourage economic change that might lead to political change.

The U.S. official who briefed reporters after the meeting said that Secretary of State George P. Shultz did not raise the issue as starkly as the other official had suggested he might.

“There are those who might be more willing (than the United States) to give economic assistance against the prospect of reform,” the official said. “But a shared view is that economic reform and political reform have a push-me-pull-you relationship.”

He also said the foreign ministers generally agreed to maintain pressure on the Soviet Union to improve its human rights record.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev discussed human rights with President Reagan at the Moscow summit meeting, creating an impression in some quarters that the Soviets were easing their policies on emigration, dissent, religion and other human rights issues.

But the U.S. official said the Soviet delegation to the economic security conference being held in Vienna continues to resist Western human rights proposals, even some that Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze had seemed to accept earlier.