Bush Warns That ‘Cold War Is Not Over’

Vice President George Bush, warning that “the Cold War is not over,” linked the reforms proposed by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to the U.S. defense buildup, and said Wednesday that the Pentagon procurement scandal must not be allowed to obscure the need to maintain that military strength.

Bush said Congress should guard against its first reaction--”to increase the regulatory bureaucracy”--at the Pentagon, and instead streamline the procurement process. The White House and Congress, he said in a speech, should “develop a new compact . . . to take the patronage and the pork out of defense.”

Later, speaking with reporters aboard Air Force Two as he flew from San Francisco to Appleton, Wis., Bush said: “I do not want that in any way to undermine or weaken a commitment to a strong defense and an approach to foreign policy that in my view has enhanced the peace and maybe has been a catalyst in some way for some of the change that has taken place” in Moscow.

Backs Soviet Reforms

The vice president’s hard-line speech, delivered to a breakfast meeting of the World Affairs Council of San Francisco at the end of a brief presidential campaign stop in Northern California, served to underline his skepticism about Gorbachev’s efforts to institute a full-scale reformation of Soviet society. But Bush also encouraged those efforts.

And in tying the twin Gorbachev policies of glasnost , or openness, and perestroika , or restructuring, to the eight years of President Reagan’s $1-trillion defense buildup, Bush sought to present what he said later was a “distinct difference” with Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, the expected Democratic presidential candidate.

Dukakis, in a speech on June 14 spelling out his defense program, criticized the Reagan Administration’s focus on such exotic weapons systems as rail-mobile MX missiles and the “Star Wars” missile defense program. He said defense spending should be concentrated more heavily than it currently is on conventional weaponry, to which approximately 85% of the Pentagon’s weapons budget is devoted.

Critical of Dukakis

Bush, more critical of Dukakis in his conversation aboard his airplane with reporters than in his speech, said the Democrat would “do away with a lot of these nuclear weapons systems” while trying to negotiate an arms control agreement with the Soviets--an approach he described as “ridiculous.”

In his speech, Bush said: “Some of the dramatic reforms General Secretary Gorbachev proposed . . . would truly, if implemented, be revolutionary.”

But the tone of the vice president’s address--one of a series he plans outlining his foreign and defense policies--reflected little of the sunny tenor that prevailed within the Reagan Administration barely three weeks ago when Reagan and Gorbachev parted company after the President’s five days in Moscow.

On the question of the procurement scandal unfolding at the Pentagon, in which the Justice Department is probing allegations that classified data was leaked to contractors and others bidding on weapons projects, Bush said increased regulation would only add “to the complexity and worsen the problem.”

After the speech, Bush flew to Wisconsin to visit a livestock auction and speak with farmers suffering from the extreme drought affecting the South, Midwest and northern plains.

Clearly in an upbeat mood on a day in which a Gallup Poll showed him trailing Dukakis by five percentage points and an ABC/Money magazine poll showed only a three-point gap--one of the narrowest margins since the two candidates have been paired head-to-head in recent months--the vice president responded jokingly when a reporter referred to Reagan’s aggressive campaigning Wednesday for him.

Asked if he couldn’t beat Dukakis on his own, the vice president replied: “I’ve got the height advantage.”