Strategic Arms Pact Likely Before Summit, Bush Says

In his most upbeat assessment yet of the prospects for reaching an agreement to cut strategic nuclear arms, President Bush said Wednesday there is “a good likelihood” that a treaty will be ready for signing by the time he meets next year with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

But Bush balked at accepting a Soviet challenge to halt all nuclear weapons tests, arguing that they are needed to maintain confidence in the safety and soundness of the warheads.

With senior Soviet and U.S. officials publicly trading optimistic forecasts almost daily--much as they have engaged in hostile verbal attacks in past years--the President’s comments reflect what he twice called the “civil climate” marking Washington’s current relations with Moscow.

Bush made the remarks in an interview in the Oval Office with a small group of reporters before flying by Marine Corps helicopter to Charlottesville to attend a two-day meeting of the nation’s governors. Bush called the sessions to examine the state of education in the United States. A transcript of the interview was made available here by the White House.

The President, who is scheduled to meet with Gorbachev in late spring or early summer, said the agreement to meet the Soviet leader “perhaps will serve as a catalyst for moving forward” in the effort to cut U.S. and Soviet arsenals of strategic, or long-range, nuclear weapons by 50%.

“It’s not a given,” he said. “But I would agree that we have a good likelihood that might happen.”

The President added: “I don’t want to set it up so that if we don’t have every ‘t’ crossed and ‘i’ dotted, that the summit next spring or summer is considered a failure.”

His optimism on the prospects for an arms agreement echoed that of Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who said in an address Tuesday to the U.N. General Assembly that by the time of the summit conference, “we may have passed the last turn on the road toward a treaty reducing strategic offensive arms. These are real prospects.”

Shevardnadze also challenged the United States to ban all production of its newest forms of chemical weapons--a step that Bush said he “absolutely” rejected.

On Monday, Bush said in a speech at the United Nations that the United States would cut its stockpile of poison gas by 80%, if the Soviets would reduce their larger supplies to a level that would be equal to the reduced American stockpiles.

The Soviet foreign minister also had said that the Soviet Union would reinstate a previous moratorium on nuclear tests “any day and hour if the United States reciprocates.”

But Bush said Wednesday: “As long as we are dependent for a deterrence based on nuclear weapons, I would have difficulty eliminating all testing.

“It’s important that these weapons be safe. It’s important they be sound,” he said. His opposition to halting the tests reflects a long-running Pentagon concern that a failure to routinely check the operations of its long-range missiles and nuclear warheads would lead to uncertainty about whether they will function accurately--and thus serve as a deterrent to others’ aggression.

Assessing the improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations, Bush said that “we don’t have a disconnect with Mr. Gorbachev,” a condition that has eased discussions of “contentious regional issues or arms control issues.”

“There have been times . . . when it was very difficult even to bring subjects up without getting a rhetorical diatribe on the question,” he said. “And now you can talk about any subject very openly. This is a very constructive development.”

Still, the President said, the two nations “will probably have strong differences for a long time.” He added: “I don’t want to do something naive or silly in defense just because we are working more closely with the Soviets today.”

Answering complaints by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) that his response to the greater political openness in the Soviet Union has been too timid, the President said, “The team I have here (in Washington) knows what it’s doing.”

On Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Mitchell called on the Administration to grant most-favored-nation trading status to the Soviet Union. He urged Bush to grant Moscow a temporary waiver of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied trade concessions until the Soviet Union allowed Jews and others to emigrate freely. Gorbachev lifted most emigration restrictions last year.

But a White House spokesman, Roman Popadiuk, said that the Administration does not plan to lift the Jackson-Vanik restrictions.

“Our position is that we would have to see some legislation, some institutionalization of the right of emigration, before lifting Jackson-Vanik,” he said.

The President defended Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s warnings of the risks of too close a relationship with Moscow, and said: “We speak with one voice. Cheney’s voice is loud and clear. And he’s saying, don’t do anything dumb. Don’t make the mistake of unilaterally disarming--knocking out significant strategic modernization programs at the very minute that the Soviet Union is going forward on the modernization front.”