East Bloc Ready to Speed Arms Talks : Warsaw Pact, Seeking Accord Within the Year, to Offer Its Troop Cut Plans

The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, welcoming recent NATO proposals on reducing conventional forces in Europe, said Saturday that they will respond quickly with further ideas of their own so that an agreement could be reached within the year.

Characterizing NATO’s proposals as meeting “halfway” the pact’s original plan for troop cuts, the leaders of the Warsaw Pact said at the end of a two-day summit meeting in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, that their negotiators will now draw up possible compromises in order to reach initial agreements as soon as possible.

While this is by far the most optimistic appraisal of what are extremely complex negotiations, both North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Warsaw Pact diplomats have said in recent weeks that, although some very difficult issues remain, an early agreement is increasingly seen as possible.

Reversing Arms Buildup

This, as Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev noted during his visit to France last week, would be a historic breakthrough in East-West relations, reversing the general arms buildup by the rival alliances over the past four decades and opening a new era of cooperative relationships in Europe.

The Warsaw Pact leaders, in a broad statement reviewing East-West relations, disarmament negotiations and other international issues, declared “their resolve to do their utmost for achieving, as soon as possible, positive results” in the negotiations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Vienna on reducing conventional armed forces in Europe.

The NATO proposals, put forward by President Bush in May and adopted at a NATO summit in Brussels, called for reducing to 275,000 the number of troops each superpower has in Central Europe--a 30,000 cutback for the United States but a 325,000-man withdrawal for the Soviet Union--as well as deep cuts in the numbers of tanks, combat aircraft and artillery that each side deploys.

The NATO proposals, however, are still being drafted at the alliance’s Brussels headquarters and will not be formally presented in Vienna until September. Warsaw Pact negotiators, who had originally proposed an overall limit of 1.35 million troops for each side in Europe, were instructed Saturday to “draw up promptly counterproposals” in order to expedite the talks.

No Specific Proposals

The Warsaw Pact statement was a broad political declaration, not a negotiating position, and thus contained no specific proposals.

The Warsaw Pact, formed as a socialist answer to NATO, groups Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania and Poland as well as the Soviet Union. NATO, now 40 years old, has 16 members, including Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, West Germany and the United States.

Gorbachev, speaking in an interview on Soviet television, said that the Warsaw Pact leaders wanted, in their response to NATO, to give the Vienna negotiations a further push, believing that “major changes” are at hand if these talks are successful.

In remarks at a dinner with other Warsaw Pact leaders on Friday, Gorbachev said the alliance would give a “serious, palpable answer” to the Western proposals.

In their statement, the Warsaw Pact leaders called for “a stable and secure Europe, free from nuclear and chemical weapons, for substantial cuts in armed forces, armaments and military spending,” according to the official Soviet news agency Tass.

But the Soviet-led alliance expressed caution over what it described as NATO’s reliance on a “position of strength” and a “strategy of nuclear deterrence” and said that, despite encouraging signs such as the superpower treaty eliminating intermediate-range missiles, “no radical turning point in disarmament questions has been recorded yet.”

The Warsaw Pact leaders renewed their call for NATO to drop plans to modernize short-range nuclear weapons in Europe and instead negotiate for their elimination. Speaking to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, on Thursday, Gorbachev had offered further unilateral reductions in the Soviet Union’s large arsenal of short-range nuclear missiles if NATO agreed to open talks on such tactical nuclear weapons. The West’s answer was a flat no.

The Warsaw Pact also proposed the establishment of a “center for lessening the military threat” in Europe that would ease fears of surprise attacks by serving as a clearinghouse for information on troop movements and maneuvers and for quick consultation.

The Warsaw Pact leaders also renewed their proposals for the step-by-step elimination of all nuclear weapons on the Continent, for an immediate ban on chemical weapons, an end to underground nuclear weapons testing and the eventual liquidation of both military blocs, thus ending the Cold War’s division of Europe.

Gorbachev, interviewed on the main Soviet television news show “Vremya,” repeated his earlier predictions that the Warsaw Pact would be transformed in coming years from a military into a political alliance.

Threshold of Major Changes

“The time will come when the need for it will disappear,” he said, arguing that the world is at the threshold of major international changes.

But Gorbachev also proposed another Warsaw Pact summit meeting to broaden economic cooperation.

“We must not be too slow here,” he said. “We must act because . . . the fact that we have fallen behind in a number of important directions is telling upon the level of well-being and, naturally, on the living standards of our people.”

In keeping with Gorbachev’s pledge that Moscow would no longer intervene in the domestic politics of its allies, the Warsaw Pact declared in a separate communique that each member country has the “right to make its own political lines, strategy and tactics without any outside interference.”

“There are no universal models of socialism,” the final communique said. “The construction of a new society is a creative process and is achieved in each country in harmony with its traditions, specific conditions and needs.

“No country has the right to dictate events in another country, to assume the position of a judge or arbiter.”

This went further than Warsaw Pact leaders had been willing to go before in declaring the independence of each Communist Party in the leadership and development of its country.

“We cut them loose, and we were freed,” a senior Soviet journalist commented from Bucharest. “The Warsaw Pact will take on a new character, a new shape following this meeting.”

But other East European sources described the communique as little more than a bridge over the widening gap between progressives and conservatives within the socialist alliance.

Hungarian and Romanian leaders quarreled bitterly over President Nicolae Ceausescu’s demolition of scores of villages, many of them inhabited by ethnic Hungarian farmers, in pursuit of Romania’s goal of industrializing agriculture.

A broad discussion on the future of the socialist trading bloc, Comecon, degenerated into such a heated argument over the role of market forces in a socialist economy that Gorbachev’s proposal for a future summit on this issue alone was welcomed as an escape, according to these sources.

“Each country is on its own road to socialist democracy and progress,” Gorbachev said in Bucharest. “Each must look for independent solutions to national problems.”