Keep Strategic Guard, Cheney Urges : Budget: The defense secretary warns a Senate panel of Soviet instability. He and GOP members use that theme to defend weapons increases.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney asserted Monday that the mounting uncertainty about the fate of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev underscores the need to step up spending on long-range nuclear weapons and the “Star Wars” anti-missile program.

Testifying on Capitol Hill as Gorbachev confronted hard-line communists following a massive demonstration in Moscow, Cheney said that nobody can predict whether Gorbachev might be replaced by a more belligerent leader “next week, next month or next year.”

It would be “very risky business for us to build a national security strategy at this point that is radically different from the past, based upon the assumption that fate will treat kindly with the current Soviet leadership,” the defense secretary told the Senate Budget Committee.

Cheney and committee Republicans repeatedly used the instability theme to counter Democratic attacks on President Bush’s proposed $4-billion increase in the B-2 Stealth bomber, MX missile, “Star Wars” and other strategic programs in fiscal 1991, which begins Oct. 1.

Although the Soviet Union appears ready to pull its troops out of Eastern Europe within five years, greatly diminishing the threat of an invasion of Western Europe, Cheney said, the threat of an intercontinental strike remains as missiles and other strategic weapons are vigorously upgraded.

“We have to deal not only with the political instability that is reported there,” he said, “we still have to deal with the reality of the Soviet military capability and the fact that it may be wielded at some point in the future by someone who does not have the same set of attitudes and policies that Mr. Gorbachev has displayed toward the West in recent months.”

Led by Committee Chairman Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.), several Democrats contended that in light of the dramatic fall of Communist governments in Eastern Europe and the simultaneous easing of U.S.-Soviet tensions, the United States should restrain strategic spending as well as reduce troop levels in Europe much more than Bush proposes.

The President has requested $295.1 billion in Pentagon spending authority, a 2.6%-cut in purchasing power from this year’s level after adjusting for inflation.

Sasser told Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the President’s request was “at a minimum about $10 billion” too high. Sasser, suggesting that he would seek deep cuts in proposed strategic spending, disdainfully cited a series of “trade-offs” in the Bush budget:

--$1.2 billion more for the B-2, $860 million less for child nutrition and fuel subsidies for the poor;

--$900 million more for the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” $1 billion less for highways;

--$1.1 billion more for the MX, $313 million less for public housing.

Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) led a chorus of Republicans who rose to Bush’s defense on strategic spending, citing Soviet instability.

Noting that he had just attended an annual meeting in Munich of officials from Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Japan, Rudman said he picked up the strong feeling that “with the raised level of instability in the Soviet Union, strategic force becomes even more important.”

Rudman added that the likely unification of West and East Germany, together with the Baltic republics’ move toward independence, would make the Soviet “even more paranoid about what people will do to it. And one thing they will do is continue to modernize strategic forces.”

The committee hearing was marked by several awkward moments when Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), pressing Cheney to implement a $39-billion package of management reforms, declared: “You’ve had three heart bypass operations, and I’d like to see it done while you’re around.”

As embarrassed murmurs filled the hearing room, Cheney said lightly, “I have not had three. I have had one. But I guess I’m going to need some kind of fix after I finish this session today.”