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CRISIS IN NATO : The Brussels Summit : Gorbachev Plan for Deep Cuts in Forces Sparked Bush’s Arms Policy Initiatives

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Times Staff Writer

The Bush Administration spent nearly four months on a slow, cautious analysis of foreign policy and then, in a flurry of meetings, produced one of the biggest U.S. foreign policy initiatives of the decade in barely two weeks.

The impetus, Administration officials said Monday, came early this month, when Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev outlined the latest Soviet arms proposal to Secretary of State James A. Baker III in Moscow.

Administration officials, who had been sharply critical of Gorbachev, now say that the Soviet leader’s proposal--offering to make deep cuts in Soviet forces--was a major breakthrough that convinced them he is serious about arms reductions.

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In the days following Baker’s meeting with Gorbachev, both critics of the Administration and many of its allies fretted that the United States was doing little to respond to the Soviet peace offensive. In fact, however, the Administration was moving rapidly and in secret to prepare a response.

When Baker returned from Moscow in early May, a senior White House official said Monday, the President directed the Pentagon to prepare a series of options that he could propose at the NATO summit.

A week after Baker’s return, as Bush vacationed at his summer retreat in Kennebunkport, Me., his top defense advisers traveled there to outline several ideas.

Baker, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Undersecretary Paul G. Wolfowitz, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and his deputy, Robert M. Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. and his vice chairman, Gen. Robert T. Herres, and Chief of Staff John H. Sununu briefed Bush for several hours over lunch in the President’s seaside home.

Although no details of the meeting leaked to the public, one effect of the session was noticeable within days. When Bush traveled that Sunday, May 21, to Boston University to deliver a speech on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its relations with the Soviets, his tone toward Gorbachev was far warmer than he and his aides had used only days before.

When Bush returned to Washington, meetings on the proposals continued, Administration officials said. On Tuesday, May 23, with the package taking final shape, the Administration dispatched Gates and Undersecretary of State Laurence S. Eagleburger to Europe to begin briefing the NATO allies.

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In Paris, Rome, Bonn, London, Brussels and Amsterdam, Eagleburger and Gates described a series of options that were under consideration, European officials said.

Option for 50% Cut

Among them were the proposals that Bush offered Monday and some that would have gone even further, including one option for a 50% reduction of U.S. combat forces in Europe.

So closely held were the deliberations that followed, however, that the NATO officials heard nothing of the reactions to the proposals.

The same day the two left, Soviet officials at the conventional arms reductions talks in Vienna formally presented the proposal that Gorbachev had outlined to Baker. The proposal accepted many of NATO’s ideas for control of non-nuclear weapons and confirmed the Administration in its belief that Gorbachev meant what he said about arms control, an Administration official said.

The next day, Wednesday, May 24, Bush flew to New London, Conn., to speak on East-West relations. Displeased with the tone of his prepared text, Bush tore it up and substituted language that praised Gorbachev’s initiatives even more clearly than he had done three days earlier in Boston.

On Thursday, the day before Bush departed for Europe, the President signed off on the final package. That afternoon, when reporters asked if the Administration had any dramatic, last-minute proposal to unveil at the NATO meeting, a senior Administration official smiled enigmatically and said: “Wait and see.”

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Alton Keel, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, and Stephen Ledogar, the chief U.S. representative to the arms reduction talks in Vienna, were briefed on Bush’s proposal only hours before the President described it to a closed meeting of NATO allies in a speech that took roughly twice his alloted 10 minutes and seized center stage at the alliance’s 40th anniversary summit.

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