European Security Talks Reported Near Agreement

The 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has been meeting in Vienna for more than two years, is on the verge of an overall agreement, diplomatic sources said Wednesday.

The final breakthrough was the result of the United States agreeing to a Soviet proposal that a human rights conference be held in Moscow in 1991, on condition that the Soviets continue to improve their record on human rights, the diplomats said. President Reagan announced his assent to the Moscow conference on Wednesday from his new home in Bel-Air, where he has been spending the holidays.

Most important, an agreement in Vienna would lead almost immediately to the long-awaited mandate for a new conference on the reduction of troops and arms in Europe, known as “conventional stability talks.”

“We think the CST could begin as soon as February or March,” an American diplomat in Vienna said Wednesday. “Right now, it looks as if everything can be wrapped up in a final (security conference) document to sign within two weeks.”

West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher said in Bonn on Wednesday that Alois Mock, the Austrian foreign affairs minister, had invited officials of the participating nations to attend the windup of the security conference’s meeting in Vienna on Jan. 17-20.

The new conventional arms talks, expected to be held in either Vienna or Geneva, would replace the long-moribund mutual and balanced forces reduction talks, which have been going on for 15 years with no result.

The security conference, under way since November, 1986, is the third follow-up conference to monitor the original Helsinki accords of 1975, signed by all European nations except Albania, plus the United States and Canada.

The new conventional stability talks will involve only the 16 nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the seven members of the Communist Warsaw Pact, although European neutral countries will be kept informed.

But the conventional arms talks will cover a much broader concept of Europe--from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains, as it has been expressed.

The Vienna talks had been expected to move quickly but ran into difficulties--with the Soviet Union over the human rights issue, and even with France, which objected to arms talks between power blocs rather than a European-wide conference.

Other NATO nations argued that serious discussions on reducing conventional arms should involve only NATO and the Warsaw Pact, because including other European countries would only confuse the issue.

The Soviet Union has been determined to hold a human rights conference in Moscow, sponsored by the security conference, which would follow a similar rights conference this year in Paris and another next year in Copenhagen.