W. Germans to Visit U.S., Urge Talks on Short-Range Weapons

Two top West German officials will make a hastily arranged trip to Washington next week to confront the United States with Bonn’s call for early superpower talks on reduction of short-range nuclear missiles, it was announced Friday.

The visit by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg, urgently requested by Bonn this week, is certain to produce new friction between the two key members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because the United States is adamantly opposed to any sort of new limits on battlefield nuclear weapons.

Genscher and Stoltenberg will meet Monday with Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Defense Minister Dick Cheney.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, “These discussions are part of an ongoing process of consultations within the Alliance to address the SNF (short-range nuclear force) issue.” He declined to provide additional details.

But the Associated Press reported from Bonn that leaders of the government’s ruling coalition have decided to press the United States to begin talks with the Warsaw Pact to eliminate the short-range nuclear weapons, those with ranges of less than 300 miles. Sources in Washington confirmed the basic thrust of the account.

The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, ratified last year, banned land-launched nuclear missiles with ranges of between 300 and 3,400 miles.

The United States and Britain oppose early short-range missile talks, arguing that Warsaw Pact superiority in conventional weapons requires a Western nuclear deterrent at least until there is an East-West agreement on reductions in non-nuclear arms.

“I would strenuously avoid the notion that we engage in negotiations on short-range nuclear forces,” Cheney said this week. “We have just completed and signed and ratified the INF accord. . . . Now is the time, I believe, to move forward on conventional forces (limitation).”

However, West Germany wants an embargo on short-range weapons because most of them are deployed along the NATO-Warsaw Pact front line in West Germany, East Germany and Czechoslavakia. West German politicians fear that a conflict could be fought with short-range nuclear systems entirely on German soil without affecting other members of either alliance.

Decision Postponed

West Germany succeeded earlier this week in persuading NATO defense ministers, meeting in Brussels, to postpone a decision on modernization of the short-range missile force until after West Germany’s 1990 election.

The AP reported that West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s coalition government voted late Thursday, shortly after the NATO session ended, to urge the United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate a reduction in short-range missiles before NATO acts on modernization.

Boucher said the United States views next week’s talks as part of the consultative process leading up to the NATO summit scheduled for May 29-30 in Brussels.