NATO Chief Asks Cooperation With East Bloc

Manfred Woerner, secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, called Tuesday for “active cooperation” with Warsaw Pact nations, the West’s traditional enemy.

Woerner, the former West German defense minister, called on the governments of NATO’s 16 member-nations to direct their attention to new political tasks that lie ahead. Speaking at NATO headquarters in ceremonies to mark the Atlantic Alliance’s 40th anniversary, he said:

“We have a unique opportunity to reshape East-West relations and to promote and peacefully influence change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by active cooperation. We must harness the new historical energies and channel them toward specific goals that will make a more just and lasting peace in Europe an irreversible process.”

Addressing concerns that NATO, in responding to recent Soviet policies on defense and arms reduction, has appeared to be merely reacting, Woerner declared: “We will strive to build a new Europe embedded in the community of free democracies in which military forces play no role other than guaranteeing the sovereignty of states.”

He said he looks forward to a Europe “that is able on the basis of self-determination for all its peoples to overcome its unnatural division and that of Germany.”

While he emphasized that NATO will become “more and more an instrument of change,” he said the Atlantic Alliance will continue to function as “the fundament of global stability and a form of insurance policy against the risks of turmoil, crisis and war.”

As to whether the lessening of the Soviet threat under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has reduced the need for NATO, Woerner said: “There are those who say . . . the alliance has fulfilled its historic mission and that it should either change or disappear from the scene. Let me tell you that they are wrong.”

Woerner said that since World War II, NATO has provided “the longest period of general peace that Europe has enjoyed since the days of the Roman Empire.”

NATO’s defensive strength, he said, will continue to be necessary, and he insisted that nuclear weapons are essential for NATO’s peacekeeping role.

Woerner emphasized the continuing need for a U.S. role in NATO and said that despite changes in Eastern Europe, Western Europe must always be closely linked to America.