Bush Offers Plan for Drastic Cuts in European Forces

President Bush, in a sweeping arms reduction proposal he declared would “transform the military map of Europe,” proposed on Monday deep cuts in manpower and aircraft to be negotiated within six months to a year.

And early this morning, after meetings that stretched late into the night, NATO foreign ministers reached agreement on the divisive issue of whether to cut NATO’s short-range nuclear forces, senior U.S. officials confirmed.

The agreement, which must still be ratified by the NATO heads of government before it is officially announced, is a compromise between positions taken by the United States and Britain on the one hand and West Germany on the other. It would leave several aspects of the dispute sufficiently vague to allow both sides to claim at least a partial victory.

Cuts by 1992 or 1993

When the summit meeting opened Monday morning, Bush, seeking to seize the initiative on arms control from Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, told the leaders of the other 15 North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations here that his proposed reductions could be accomplished by 1992 or 1993.

“There is no reason why a five- to six-year timetable” suggested by Gorbachev in the Soviets’ earlier arms reduction proposal is necessary, the President declared.

“We may be on the verge of a revolutionary and more ambitious arms control agreement than anyone considered possible,” he said.

Agreement on compromise language on short-range missiles was the final step needed to allow NATO to conclude its 40th anniversary summit with a comprehensive statement of the alliance’s strategy for negotiations with the Warsaw Pact.

Although compromise language was worked out by Secretary of State James A. Baker III and his fellow foreign ministers, it must still be reviewed by Bush and the other NATO chiefs. And, a senior European diplomat warned, the hard-line position of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher might yet prove to be a stumbling block.

West Germany has been pressing for “early” negotiations with the Soviets over the short-range forces. In addition, the Bonn government, particularly Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, has pushed for NATO to declare that total elimination of short-range weapons is the alliance’s ultimate goal.

The United States and Britain, by contrast, have insisted that negotiations over the short-range forces can begin only after a treaty on limiting conventional, non-nuclear forces has been negotiated. And both Bush and Thatcher have insisted on ruling out the possibility of eliminating the weapons altogether.

Washington and London have feared that eliminating short-range forces would open the door to eventual total “de-nuclearization” of Europe, a step that would leave NATO vulnerable to the far-larger non-nuclear forces of the Soviet Union and its allies.

Work for ‘Partial Reductions’

Under the compromise worked out this morning, the alliance would agree to work toward “partial reductions” in short-range weapons. The statement does not explicitly rule out the German request for a total reduction, as Thatcher has wanted, but U.S. officials say the language satisfies them.

“It is certainly consistent with an American position,” one senior negotiator said.

Negotiations over the short-range forces would begin as soon as a conventional arms agreement is implemented, sources said. But because Bush is calling for completing those negotiations within a year, that schedule apparently will meet the German demand for “early” talks.

But completing a conventional accord along the lines of Bush’s new proposals will be extraordinarily complex, and it may be difficult to meet the President’s timetable, Administration officials conceded.

“It makes strategic arms talks look simple by comparison,” said a senior official, referring to the negotiations on long-range nuclear missiles.

The Bush proposals, embraced warmly by the other NATO leaders, would require the Warsaw Pact to make much deeper cuts in all categories of manpower and equipment because of their current overwhelming superiority in conventional forces.

Overall Ceiling of 275,000

Bush proposed an overall ceiling of 275,000 troops each for the United States and the Soviet Union in Europe. That would require the United States to cut its combat forces by 30,000 men and the Soviets to cut 10 times that number.

As Bush told the allied leaders, bringing the Soviets to a “fair and balanced level of strength would compel the Soviets to reduce their 600,000-strong Red Army in Eastern Europe by 325,000.”

Based on NATO figures, the Bush proposals would require the Warsaw Pact to destroy eight times more planes and four times as many helicopters.

Bush, responding to a series of Soviet proposals for reducing conventional forces, agreed for the first time to include manpower, helicopters and land-based military aircraft in the Conventional Forces in Europe talks in Vienna.

Thatcher declared that the Bush proposal had “transformed the summit” but warned against excessive optimism.

Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers of the Netherlands said that accelerating the timetable for a treaty and implementing the reductions were the most significant parts of the Bush plan.

“The experts may not be happy with this, but as a politician, I think it’s the right thing to do,” he said, in a reference to the complexity of negotiations ahead.

‘A Fitting Legacy’

Laying out his bold proposal at the opening session of NATO’s two-day summit here, Bush told the other leaders, “It would be a fitting legacy to our grandchildren that, at NATO’s 40th anniversary, we launched NATO’s new agenda that broke down the military, political, and economic barriers that have separated East from West for most of our lifetime.”

The four-point Bush proposal, which builds on earlier negotiations at Vienna, includes:

-- “Locking in” the Warsaw Pact’s earlier acceptance of a NATO proposal that would set ceilings on each side’s numbers of tanks and armored troop carriers. The Warsaw Pact would have to destroy 15 times more tanks and eight times more personnel carriers than NATO.

Bush also proposed that NATO seek an agreement on a similar ceiling for artillery, provided questions of defining the artillery involved can be defined. All of the equipment reduced would be destroyed.

-- Expanding the current NATO proposal so that each side would reduce its stocks of military planes and helicopters to 15% below current NATO levels. Again, all of the reduced equipment would be destroyed.

-- Setting a 275,000 ceiling on U.S. and Soviet ground and air force personnel stationed outside their national territories. The United States would make its cut by reducing its combat troops--roughly 150,000 of the total 305,000 U.S. force in Europe--by 20%. Withdrawn service personnel on both sides would be demobilized, making it difficult for either side to conceal attempts to evade the limits.

-- Accelerating the timetable for reaching a Vienna agreement and implementing the required reductions.

As previously reported, Bush also told the NATO allies that the United States would agree to ease trade sanctions imposed in 1980 on the East Bloc after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“I believe that it should be possible to reach such agreement in six months or maybe a year, and to accomplish the reductions by 1992 or 1993,” Bush said at a brief press conference shortly after spelling out his proposals to the NATO leaders.

The President, nettled by criticism that he had been too slow responding to Gorbachev’s initiatives, said that he had deliberately taken his time to study the situation. “We knew exactly what we were doing all along,” he said.

He acknowledged his Administration “has taken a little bit of a hammering for not engaging in the public relations battle” with Gorbachev.

But “the safety and security of American forces, for which I have direct responsibility as commander in chief, is too serious to be jeopardized by feeling we always have to be out front on some public relations gambit,” he said.

BALANCE OF POWER--Present Nato and Warsaw Pact forces, compared to Bush’s proposed cuts. Personnel figures for U.S. and Soviet forces only; weapons figures include NATO and Warsaw Pact.

PERSONNEL U.S.: 305,000 Soviet: 600,000 PROPOSED CEILING: 275,000 COMBAT AIRCRAFT NATO: 3,977 WARSAW PACT: 8,250 PROPOSED CEILING: 3,400 HELICOPTERS NATO: 2,419 WARSAW PACT: 3,700 PROPOSED CEILING: 2,000 TANKS NATO: 22,000 WARSAW PACT: 52,200 PROPOSED CEILING: 20,000 PERSONNEL CARRIERS NATO: 35,351 WARSAW PACT: 71,000 PROPOSED CEILING: 28,000 SOURCE: NATO estimates