U.S. Rejects Bonn’s Appeal for Early Talks on Missiles

The Bush Administration on Monday rebuffed West Germany’s appeal for early East-West negotiations on limiting short-range nuclear weapons, apparently setting the stage for a showdown on the subject next month at a summit meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders.

“They explained their positions. . . . We explained our position,” Secretary of State James A. Baker III said in a chilly statement. “As a result, we understand their position better and they understand ours better.”

State Department officials said later that the unusually blunt language signified an impasse that almost four hours of talks did nothing to break.

The dispute has its origins in West Germany’s domestic politics. Unless it is resolved soon, it could drive a wedge between the United States and NATO’s most influential European member.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, faced with plummeting popularity going into national elections scheduled for late next year, sent Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg on a hastily scheduled trip to Washington to press Bonn’s demand for U.S.-Soviet talks about limits on battlefield nuclear weapons.

Bonn is seeking movement on the issue before NATO decides whether it will modernize the Western alliance’s existing arsenal. The modernization decision is now scheduled for 1991.

By taking a firm stand against the short-range missiles, Kohl and his coalition government apparently hope to defuse the appeal of the more dovish Social Democratic Party and the anti-NATO Greens party.

The weapons are very unpopular in West Germany because most of them are stored on German territory and, with ranges of less than 300 miles, could be expected to do most of their damage in Germany in the event of war between NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.

The failure of the Washington meeting, attended by Baker, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, White House National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Genscher and Stoltenberg, to paper over the U.S-West German differences pushes the dispute into the NATO summit meeting scheduled May 29-30 in Brussels. President Bush, Kohl and other heads of government of the 16-nation alliance are expected to attend.

U.S. officials said that Bush had hoped for a harmonious NATO summit that would dramatize Western unity and set the stage for later arms control talks with Moscow. For this reason, the Administration wanted to smooth over the dispute before the Brussels meeting, but the U.S. side was unwilling to make substantial concessions to narrow the gap between the two positions. Talking to reporters aboard Air Force One on the flight to Norfolk, Va., where he attended a memorial service for the sailors killed on the battleship Iowa, President Bush struck a conciliatory tone.

“My appeal to the Germans has been that we keep NATO together, to stay together,” Bush said.

But Baker, Cheney and Scowcroft refused to soften the U.S. position. The United States, strongly supported by Britain, opposes any reduction in battlefield nuclear weapons before a comprehensive East-West pact to reduce conventional arms in Europe. The reasoning in Washington and London is that the nuclear weapons are needed to offset a Warsaw Pact advantage in tanks, artillery and other non-nuclear arms.

Cheney left the talks briefly for a previously scheduled speech at the National Defense University. Answering questions after the speech, he made it clear that he is not persuaded by the West German presentation.

“We now find ourselves where there are a number of people who would like to move fairly rapidly to negotiate (limits on) short-range nuclear forces,” he said. “I think that would be a mistake for several reasons. . . . We need to remind ourselves that the situation on the ground, in Europe, is overwhelming Soviet conventional superiority.

“We dealt with that for nearly 40 years by having deployed in Europe tactical nuclear weapons, short-range nuclear weapons and that for the foreseeable future, certainly as long as there is overwhelming Soviet conventional superiority, there’s absolutely no rationale at all for us to talk about eliminating or significantly reducing those short-range forces,” Cheney said.

Opinion polls in West Germany indicate that the public there is persuaded that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will not launch a war in Europe, a view that seriously erodes support for NATO as a defense against a Soviet attack.

West Germany won a partial victory last week when NATO defense ministers, meeting in Brussels, agreed to postpone until 1991 the decision on whether to go ahead with U.S. plans to modernize and increase the range of the Lance missiles now stationed in West Germany. In effect, the decision was pushed back until after the West German election to avoid political embarrassment to Kohl and his political allies.

U.S. officials were taken aback when Kohl sought to build on his success by demanding East-West negotiations that could outlaw short-range nuclear systems before agreement is reached on conventional arms.

“Secretary Baker has said on a number of occasions that we should make an effort to work this out through negotiations with the Federal Republic and our allies before the summit,” State Department spokesman Margaret Tutwiler said.

“Secretary Baker has said many times that it would be preferable if we could move to modernize our short-range nuclear weapons, although we understand the Federal Republic’s problem regarding the timing of any such decision,” she added. “And he has said that we think it would be a mistake to engage in negotiations on (short-range nuclear forces).”

Genscher and Stoltenberg left for home shortly after the meeting ended in mid-afternoon. According to British newspaper accounts, the two ministers canceled a scheduled stop in London for talks with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who could have been expected to underline the message delivered by Baker, Cheney and Scowcroft.