NATO Report Cites East Bloc Superiority : Alliance Estimates Show Huge Advantage in Hardware, Troops

NATO on Friday issued estimates showing that the Warsaw Pact holds a huge conventional military advantage in Europe on the ground and in the air and challenged the Soviet-led alliance to disclose the actual size of its conventional forces.

The report said that the seven-nation Warsaw Pact organization has great superiority in 11 major arms systems and that in eight of these, the Soviet Union alone outguns all 16 North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations and its Warsaw Pact allies combined.

The report cites these figures for individual arms systems for the Warsaw Pact nations with comparable figures for NATO in parenthesis:

Main battle tanks, 51,500 (16,424); armored infantry fighting vehicles, 22,400 (4,153); other armored vehicles, 71,000 (35,351); artillery, 43,400 (13,857); anti-tank weapons, 44,200 (18,240); air defense systems, 24,400 (10,109); helicopters, 3,700 (2,419); personnel, 3 million (2.2 million), and combat aircraft 8,250 (3,977).

The report excluded naval forces. It also excluded land weapons held in storage because it said these could not be counted on the Warsaw Pact side.

Officials hope the 28-page report--the first non-nuclear force appraisal issued by NATO since 1984--will steal back some of the public relations ground lost to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev over arms control.

“We hope with our initiative to persuade the Warsaw Pact to follow up their recent declaration of willingness to provide data by actually doing so,” said NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner, unveiling the report at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Woerner told a news conference that the report, titled “Conventional Forces in Europe: The Facts,” was being handed over to Warsaw Pact representatives in Vienna on Friday.

Appeal to Gorbachev

“Our intention is to further the course of military transparency and openness. I would like again to appeal to Mr. Gorbachev to match his words with deeds,” he said.

NATO says that in its forthcoming Conventional Stability Talks (CST) with Warsaw Pact states, it wants to eliminate disparities in heavy weapons systems capable of launching a surprise attack and holding territory. The talks will cover the territory between the Ural Mountains in the Soviet Union to Europe’s Atlantic coast.

They are to replace the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks on force levels in seven NATO and four Warsaw Pact nations in Central Europe which have remained fruitless after almost 15 years.

The figures clashed with those published earlier this year by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

In the 1988-89 edition of “The Military Balance,” the IISS gave NATO a 2.34 million to 2.143 million advantage over the Warsaw Pact in troop strength. It set the Warsaw Pact’s advantage in main battle tanks at 53,000 to NATO’s 22,200.

But the NATO report said that differences in counting rules and definitions could show discrepancies with figures already published in the West. It said the NATO figures were based on contributions from allied nations. U.S. officials said the East Bloc data came from a pool of estimates by intelligence experts from NATO capitals.

The Warsaw Pact says there is rough parity overall on the battlefield. It accepts it has many more tanks but says this is offset by a NATO advantage in battle-ready divisions, anti-tank weapons and fighter-bombers.

NATO is seeking deep asymmetric cuts by the Warsaw Pact at the CST talks to bring the two sides to parity.

Officials stressed that the figures were only a broad outline of the more detailed negotiating position they would put to the Warsaw Pact at the talks.

The two blocs are discussing a broad mandate for the talks. But the negotiations cannot begin until the follow-up conference in Vienna on European Security and Cooperation, currently stalled over human rights, has wound up.