Gorbachev Plan Called 1st Step : NATO Says Cuts Are Not Enough for Arms Balance

The foreign ministers of NATO, adopting a unified position for expected conventional arms reduction talks, said Thursday that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s pledge to scrap 10,000 tanks and eliminate other weapons is a welcome first step but is not nearly enough to establish a safe East-West balance.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, attending his last meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s governing council, argued that the plan Gorbachev outlined Wednesday in a U.N. speech does not eliminate the Soviet Union’s capacity to mount a tank-led blitz across Western Europe.

Strategy Approved

On the first day of their regular winter meeting, the foreign ministers approved a negotiating strategy intended to reduce conventional weapons in Europe to the point where “no country should be able to dominate the continent by force of arms.”

In effect, the plan would require Moscow to scrap 25,000 tanks--more than twice the number that Gorbachev volunteered to eliminate. NATO’s far smaller tank forces would be left essentially untouched.

Before he left New York on Thursday, Gorbachev urged the West to take “certain steps” to match Moscow’s promised unilateral arms reductions. But the NATO position rejects such a reciprocal gesture because the alliance maintains that the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact is far ahead of NATO in tanks, artillery and other weapons needed to mount an offensive.

According to European sources at the top-secret NATO meeting, the alliance’s hard-line response may not be well received by the Western European public. But an American official who attended the session said none of the foreign ministers had advocated a Western gesture to respond to Gorbachev’s initiative.

“You can acknowledge progress, but you don’t have to be blind to the figures” that show the Warsaw Pact has far more weapons, a senior U.S. official said.

The negotiating strategy is the result of two years of work by a NATO task force and resolves a myriad of differences within the alliance over the approach to conventional arms talks with the Warsaw Pact. But it will be subject to long and hard negotiations, once a new round of East-West talks on conventional forces begin next year.

The policy focuses only on weapons and not on manpower cuts because, U.S. officials said, reductions in troop levels would be almost impossible to verify.

The new negotiations are intended to replace the mutual and balanced force reduction talks, which dragged on without result for 15 years. U.S. officials say many of the issues that turned the earlier talks into a fruitless debate have been eliminated by mutual agreement on each side.

New Talks Expected

The new round, limited to the 16 NATO and seven Warsaw Pact members, is expected to begin after the conclusion of the current European security talks in Vienna. West German officials said Thursday that the Vienna conference will end Jan. 6, but U.S. officials said some details remain unclear and that an end to the conference later in January is likely.

The Vienna meeting has been stalled by Moscow’s reluctance to agree to a human rights standard proposed by the West.

But one U.S. official said the human rights policy also outlined in Gorbachev’s U.N. speech, if put into practice, would meet most of the Western conditions. The Soviet leader said that new laws will prohibit “any form of persecution” on political or religious grounds and that restrictions on emigration will be significantly eased.

In its conventional arms reduction plan, the NATO foreign ministers acknowledged that Gorbachev’s speech Wednesday was “a positive contribution.”

“The important thing is now to build on these hopeful developments at the negotiating table in order to correct the large asymmetries that will still remain and to secure a balance at lower levels of forces,” they said.

For example, NATO suggested an overall limit of about 40,000 tanks in Europe from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. Although some disparities might remain, that would mean about 20,000 tanks for each alliance.

According to NATO figures, the Warsaw Pact now has 41,500 tanks, of which more than 36,000 are Moscow’s. NATO has 16,424 tanks, comfortably below the proposed limit.

Also, the plan proposes that in each category of arms, no one country should possess more than 30% of the total held by all 23 NATO and Warsaw Pact countries combined.

“In the case of tanks, this would result of an entitlement of no more than about 12,000 for any one country,” the NATO foreign ministers said in their statement. No country but the Soviet Union even approaches that figure--but Moscow would have to reduce its arsenal by 25,000 to reach it.

A U.S. official said the NATO plan proposes overall arms levels that would leave the alliance with about 95% of its current force while requiring Warsaw Pact weapons to be cut in half or even more.

American officials here generally conceded they were worried that Gorbachev, by talking about peace, might erode NATO’s reason for existence, which has been to protect the West from Soviet aggression.

One senior U.S. official said Washington will argue that “the Soviets have 5.5 million troops. Not a one has moved. We’ve only heard a speech. It’s an awfully small step for splitting the United States from Europe. I think the alliance is stronger than that.”