Nunn Calls for Prudence on Defense Cuts : Congress: The senator also charges the Pentagon has overestimated the Soviet threat. Cheney responds with angry attack on lawmakers.

With Democrats seeking a consensus on cutting the defense budget, influential Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) threw his support Thursday behind a go-slow approach to reshaping the military and blasted liberal colleagues for seeking deep cuts too quickly.

The statement by the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee appeared to align him with his House counterpart, Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), and other Democratic leaders, reinforcing indications that Congress is moving toward a relatively modest “peace dividend” this year.

In a floor speech, Nunn staked out a centrist position, attacking both deep-slashing lawmakers and charging that Pentagon officials have failed to take account of a diminished Soviet threat.

Thus, the senator assailed Democratic proposals for large, immediate defense cuts ranging up to $20 billion--the figure recommended by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.). Such reductions would “result in severe disruptions to our military personnel programs and operations,” Nunn said.

But he also asserted that President Bush’s $303-billion request for fiscal 1991, which begins Oct. 1, “is based on a 1988 threat and a 1988 strategy. . . . I am certain that more programs will have to be terminated than the Defense Department has recommended so far.”

Nunn warned that if Pentagon officials do not come up with further suggested cuts soon, Congress will make the choices on its own.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney fired back in a speech hours later, insisting that the Administration’s budget was up to date. As a matter of fact, he said, the spending plan was based on a “rosy scenario,” projecting a continued decline in the Soviet threat.

“Let’s grant the optimists all of their assumptions,” Cheney said at a National Press Club luncheon. “Those assumptions are precisely the ones that we’ve used in designing our defense budget from now through 1997.”

Suggesting that he was in no mood to back down, Cheney acidly suggested that some liberal lawmakers are hypocrites.

“What Congress gives me is complaints instead of solutions,” he said. “Some of the members who are the biggest advocates of deep (military) cuts yell the loudest when it comes time to cut something in their districts.”

The two speeches demonstrated that, while a Democratic consensus on defense cuts may be jelling in Congress, Cheney and key congressional leaders remain significantly apart, with battle lines apparently hardening.

Nunn charged that the Pentagon’s five-year spending plan contains “big blanks.” He noted that officials so far have identified only $70 billion of a projected $167 billion in reductions needed to produce a promised 2% annual decline in defense budgets.

Addressing liberal colleagues, Nunn stressed the need for a “long-term, multiyear approach” to cutting the defense budget. Like Aspin, he suggested that only relatively small outlay reductions are practicable in the first two years--but long-term policy changes can be made now that will produce huge savings in three to five years.

Nunn said killing off major weapons such as the B-2 bomber, the rail MX missile, the Trident submarine and its new missile, a new attack submarine, the C-17 transport, a new helicopter and all major current aviation programs would save only about $3 billion in 1991 spending, but the reduction in long-term spending authority would be $28.5 billion.

Staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this story.