NEWS ANALYSIS : Plan Is a P.R. Hit for Bush but Hard Work Remains

President Bush’s far-reaching arms offer here Monday may not have been the “transforming” event that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher claimed. But it was clearly a serious effort to show that the pace of change in East-West relations does not always leave the United States behind.

The proposal--to cut U.S. combat personnel in Europe for the first time in almost 30 years and to make deep reductions in associated war equipment--succeeded best in making a public relations splash.

Some U.S. experts felt Monday that this aspect of the offer was somewhat overemphasized in an effort to win applause for Bush that would overshadow the popularity in Europe of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. They noted that personnel cuts were likely to be included in U.S.-Soviet arms talks eventually if they were to achieve their promise.

In substantive terms, too, the short- and long-term prospects for the new U.S. position is none too certain.

Bush’s broadening of the scope of the Vienna talks--to cover personnel and aircraft as well as tanks, artillery and other armor--so complicates the negotiations that his goal of early agreement may be dashed by the comprehensiveness of his new offer.

The Vienna talks, involving all 16 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as well as seven Warsaw Pact members, will be far more complex than strategic arms negotiations between the United States and Soviet Union by themselves.

Ralph Earle, a former U.S. strategic arms negotiator, said he believes the six- to 12-month goal set by Bush is unrealistic. In six years of the Geneva strategic talks, he recalled, fully half the time was occupied negotiating definitions of arms to be covered in the treaty.

Similarly, Kenneth L. Adelman, former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, predicted that a conventional arms agreement would take years to negotiate, with definitions on such matters as what constitutes attack versus defense certain to delay proceedings.

Senior U.S. officials, however, contended that the exceptionally rapid progress made at the Vienna talks, thanks in large part to Moscow’s acceptance of the initial NATO offer, makes prospects for early agreement realistic.

The NATO and Warsaw Pact proposals at Vienna fall into three broad categories: tanks and other armor, personnel and aircraft, including fixed-wing land-based attack planes as well as helicopters. The two sides appear close on at least two of them, officials claim.

The number of tanks and personnel carriers each would be allowed to keep are very close. They are farther apart on artillery, but on Monday, Bush proposed to compromise the difference.

On personnel, the Soviets would ostensibly cut 10 times more soldiers and air force personnel from their forces in Eastern Europe than the United States would reduce in Western Europe. But, in fact, the Soviets already have proposed almost halving their forces to 325,000.

Bush’s proposal calls for the Soviets to withdraw an additional 50,000 troops, compared to the anticipated U.S. cutback of 30,000, officials said.

Aircraft and helicopters will provide the most difficult obstacle, with vast differences in the numbers each side attributes to the other. The Soviets claim the two sides are roughly equal, at somewhat more than 7,000 planes each, but NATO insists the Soviets have a 2-to-1 advantage.

Much of this difference is due to problems of definition, but another major stumbling block will probably be negotiation of verification provisions to monitor the reductions provided in any new treaty.

In the broader perspective, the new U.S. proposal brought forward Western agreement to discuss the categories of personnel and aircraft that the Soviets had insisted upon from the start.

NATO had restricted its initial offer to tanks, artillery and armored personnel carriers in the first phase of the negotiations. It had argued that personnel should be covered only indirectly, by providing that the personnel associated with the tank and other units be withdrawn along with their equipment.

The West now appears to have been forced by the pressure of public opinion to include this category for negotiations.

The 30,000 cut in U.S. combat personnel also appears less than a totally fresh overture. This number approximates the personnel associated with tank and other armor units slated for withdrawal under NATO’s previous offer, plus personnel who operated the medium-range missiles that are being eliminated under terms of the U.S.-Soviet treaty signed in December, 1987.

Nonetheless, Bush received uniformly high marks overall for the new U.S. initiative because it seeks, as he said, to “lock in” the previous Soviet offers.

Some Administration officials have professed concern that Gorbachev may be succeeded by a more conservative Soviet leader who will reverse some of his more promising reforms as well as his radical arms overtures. This anxiety has grown more acute in the wake of the Chinese student demonstrations, whose effect in Moscow, according to U.S. officials, is likely to put a brake on Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) program.

In addition, NATO’s lengthy debate over the short-range nuclear forces issue, which stretched into this morning here, has created increasing animosity among officials from the United States, Britain and probably France toward West Germany, and particularly Bonn’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

Although NATO foreign ministers early today reached agreement on the short-range forces issue, the agreement only papers over some aspects of the dispute, leaving open the possibility that animosities will flare again before the negotiations are completed.