Cold War Over, Bonn Foreign Minister Says

West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher added his voice Sunday to those proclaiming that the Cold War, which has dominated superpower relations for more than four decades, is over.

Genscher made his statement while opening the 35th meeting of the West German-American Friendship Week in Stuttgart at a time when the Bonn government is at odds with its U.S. and British allies over nuclear weapons policy.

“The Cold War is at an end,” declared Genscher, who is also deputy federal chancellor. “The Iron Curtain is getting brittle. It’s crumbling. This is the historic moment in which we’re making policy.”

Gorbachev’s Offers Applauded

Genscher, a leader of the liberal Free Democratic party, a junior partner in the government coalition, has been in the forefront of Western leaders who have applauded Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s offers to reduce armaments in Europe.

However, Genscher has pushed the West German government into going a long step further than London and Washington by calling for “early” talks with Moscow to reduce short-range nuclear forces in Europe.

The West German position has caused a serious rift within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is worried that the scheduled NATO summit meeting May 29-30 in Brussels may be disrupted by the controversy.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney stressed again Sunday the Bush Administration’s insistence that reductions in Warsaw Pact conventional arms precede any talks about reducing short-range nuclear weapons in Europe.

Interviewed on the ABC program “This Week with David Brinkley,” Cheney hinted at a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe if they were to be left without a short-range nuclear shield. But House Armed Forces Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.) and Paul H. Nitze, who was senior arms control negotiator in the Ronald Reagan Administration, urged Washington to compromise to mend the alliance split. Nitze and Aspin appeared on another segment of the same program.

Cheney declared: “We do not foresee a set of circumstances in which you would have U.S. troops deployed in Western Europe where you would not also have as a significant component of deterrence nuclear weapons--short-range nuclear forces.”

However, he avoided directly advocating withdrawal of U.S. troops if short-range nuclear weapons--those with a range of up to 300 miles--were to be taken out of Western Europe. “That’s a strictly hypothetical situation I wouldn’t get into,” he told a questioner.

Nitze warned that forcing West Germany to agree to modernization of the aging Lance missiles that are now a part of NATO’s arsenal and at the same time vetoing short-range nuclear talks with Moscow “is apt to pull Germany apart and NATO apart.” He suggested that Washington agree to Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s proposal that a decision on modernization be put off until talks take place with the Kremlin on short-range nuclear arms cuts.

Pressure for Pullout

Aspin conceded that congressional impatience at a refusal by West Germany to go along with modernizing the Lance missiles could result in pressure for pulling American troops out of Europe.

“If there is a sentiment to . . . (eliminate) all nuclear weapons, I think the issue of ‘no nukes, no troops’ could start to get into the forefront,” Aspin said. “It’s not this year, but I could see it down the line, yes.”

Genscher predicted in his speech that the NATO summit meeting will agree on a “joint political strategy toward the East and on a concept that provides more security for East and West, which therefore excludes no kind of weapons from disarmament.”

The United States and Britain oppose negotiations on the short-range nuclear forces until serious progress has been made in the conventional arms reduction talks under way in Vienna between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Washington and London are also opposed to eliminating all short-range nuclear forces in Europe because they believe a local nuclear deterrent is needed to counter Soviet conventional strength.

They also fear that West German public opinion would exert enormous pressure on any such talks for the banning of all ground-based nuclear missiles in Europe.

Genscher is known to be unhappy about recent opinions expressed by Administration officials in Washington that caution is required because Gorbachev could fail in his attempts to reform Soviet society and be replaced by someone likely to take a harder line toward the West.

Calling for Initiatives

In an apparent allusion to this view in his speech Sunday, Genscher called for more Western initiatives, declaring:

“Every responsible security policy is made with the inviolable knowledge that the security of today cannot be based on the hopes and expectations of tomorrow. But it is just as correct to say that the security of tomorrow cannot be based on the assumption that everything will remain the same.”

West Germany has apparently succeeded in lining up a majority of NATO’s 16 nations behind its view that modernization of the short-range nuclear forces should be delayed and that negotiations with the Soviets to reduce their number should begin as soon as possible.

The NATO summit meeting was to have produced a document, called a comprehensive concept, that would spell out policy on force levels and arms reductions in the years ahead.

However, the language of that document is now up in the air because of the split between the West Germans and the Americans and British.

Times staff writer Don Shannon, in Washington, contributed to this story.