Bush Asks New A-Arms Cutback : Superpowers: The President proposes reducing or eliminating ground-based nuclear weapons in Europe. He concedes worry on future Soviet military resurgence.

President Bush proposed a new treaty Thursday that could reduce or eliminate ground-based, short-range nuclear weapons in Europe, a step the Administration hopes will allow the Soviet Union to live more easily with a united Germany’s presence in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Bush acknowledged that he does “worry about the military resurgence of some kind inside the Soviet Union.” Soviet generals, wary about the rapid pace of warming superpower relations, appear to have forced civilian leaders to back away from proposed arms control deals, senior Administration officials say.

And even though Bush denied a direct link between those concerns and his new arms control plan, Administration officials indicated they hope that offering to negotiate away the thousands of U.S. nuclear artillery pieces and short-range missiles in the NATO’s arsenal will ease the Soviet military’s concerns about a united Germany’s membership in the alliance.

“We ought to look at ways our objectives can be accomplished that reduce the friction or enhance the acceptability on the part of the Soviet Union as much as possible,” a senior Administration official said in briefing reporters on Bush’s plan.

The initial Soviet response to Bush’s proposal was positive, with Tass, the official Soviet news agency, declaring that the new American proposal had been a Soviet idea in the first place.

Bush announced his new arms plan during a 45-minute press conference in which he also:

* Said he is looking for “goodwill gestures” he can offer Iran, citing in particular U.S. efforts to uncover information about four Iranian diplomats believed to have been killed in Lebanon in 1982. But, he added, “there were no behind-the-scenes negotiations that will come out” that led to the recent release from Lebanon of two American hostages.

* Called, again, for Congress to give him more flexibility in doling out foreign aid.

* Expressed “disappointment” with the results of his policy toward China but insisted that he has “no apologies” for his attempts to avoid a break in relations between the two countries after the Chinese leadership smashed the nation’s democracy movement last June. “Preserving a relationship with the People’s Republic of China in the broad global context is important,” he said.

* Joked about the heckling that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev received during the May Day parade Tuesday. “He ought to come join some of the parades I go to around here,” Bush said. “That’s the fruits of democracy. He’s just learning.”

But, Bush acknowledged, Gorbachev is “under extraordinary pressure at home, particularly on the economy, and I do from time to time worry about a takeover that will set back the whole process.”

In Brussels, where Secretary of State James A. Baker III briefed NATO foreign ministers on the new arms control proposals, Baker and NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner said that NATO allies are unanimous in their support.

But, as Baker and other officials made clear, several fundamental parts of the new proposal remain undecided, including whether the eventual goal of the new talks will be total elimination of ground-based nuclear weapons in Europe, as many Europeans have urged, or only a reduction in the superpower arsenals.

“We will have to work out the specifics of our negotiating position internally (within the Administration) and with our allies,” Baker said. Many decisions about the new plan will not be made until a NATO summit that Bush said will take place in late June or early July.

Bush’s new arms plan is part of a basic reevaluation of NATO defense strategy to adapt to what the President called “the transformed Europe of the 1990s.”

The new proposal has two parts. First, effective immediately, the United States will stop modernizing nuclear artillery shells in Europe and cease work on modernizing the short-range Lance missiles now used by NATO. Next, the Administration will ask the Soviet Union to begin negotiating a new treaty on removing the short-range weapons now in place.

Currently, NATO has about 680 Lance warheads and more than 1,400 nuclear artillery shells, most of which are based in West Germany.

With the collapse of Communist governments in Eastern Europe and the effective end of the Warsaw Pact as a military force, plans to modernize short-range weapons have been increasingly unpopular in Europe and on Capitol Hill.

The current weapons have ranges no greater than 75 miles and therefore would be guaranteed to explode within the territory of what are now friendly, democratic nations.

Bush “only performed the last rites” for a modernization plan that was “already dead,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.).

“We have to realize that the situation in Europe has changed,” West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told reporters in Brussels. “The American proposal is a contribution to that.”

The Administration continues to oppose strongly the removal of all nuclear weapons from Europe, believing that they are essential to maintain a stable military balance. At the same time that it negotiates possible elimination of ground-based weapons, it is likely to push for an increased emphasis on air-launched cruise missiles to maintain NATO’s nuclear deterrent, U.S. officials say.

NATO officials believe that the ground-based weapons, particularly nuclear artillery, are of limited use and could be eliminated entirely if the Soviets would agree to do the same. Baker, in fact, told reporters in Brussels that Washington might decide to begin removing some short-range nuclear weapons before a treaty is negotiated.

The United States also might continue producing Lance missiles and nuclear artillery shells for use outside of Europe, he said, noting that no decision has been made on either of those issues.

U.S. and Soviet negotiators are working at conferences on three arms treaties: The strategic arms reduction talks, which are designed to reduce the superpowers’ arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons; the talks on conventional forces in Europe, aimed at reducing non-nuclear weapons and armies in Europe, and meetings on an international pact aimed at banning chemical weapons.

The new talks on short-range missiles would begin once a conventional forces treaty is signed. Baker said that the United States is hopeful that such an agreement can be reached before the end of this year. But, he conceded, the talks “have not proceeded as rapidly as we might have hoped.”

“We have some proposals on the table and we are waiting for some answers from the Soviet Union,” Baker said.

Once those talks are complete, the United States is likely to begin a new round of negotiations on conventional forces to accommodate a Soviet desire to see a cap set on the size of the German army, according to the senior official who briefed reporters on Bush’s plans.

The Soviets have tried to bring up that issue in the so-called two-plus-four talks about German unification, a move that the United States has resisted. The foreign ministers of West and East Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France meet Saturday in Bonn to begin the formal talks after several weeks of lower-level discussions.

The United States, Baker said, will seek to limit the talks to the status of Berlin and other matters left over from the occupation of Germany that followed World War II. He said that the United States will not allow those talks to become a forum for debating Germany’s membership in NATO, which Baker called “not negotiable.”

NATO’s foreign ministers voted unanimously Thursday to approve alliance membership for Germany after completion of the reunification process and agreed not to expand NATO military forces into territory now part of East Germany.

Bush said in his press conference that he hopes the conventional forces treaty could be signed late this year at a meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 35-nation body that includes the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union and all European states except Albania. The conference would meet in Paris, while the Administration has offered to host a preliminary foreign ministers meeting of the group in New York in September.

The conference is best known for the 1975 Helsinki Accords that ratified the postwar boundaries of Europe and adopted a variety of human rights measures, most of them virtually ignored by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies until recently.

Baker said that the 35-nation conference, once scorned by Washington as a debating society, looms large in the U.S. view of a post-Cold War Europe. He had suggested to the NATO foreign ministers “a number of ideas for transforming CSCE from a process into more of an institution,” Baker said.

For instance, he said, the 35-nation group could adopt mechanisms for resolving disputes among member countries, conduct regular political consultations, and establish a procedure for members to obtain clarifications of unusual military activities.

Lauter reported from Washington and Kempster from Brussels. Times staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg, in Moscow, also contributed to this report.

BUSH HIGHLIGHTS

Nuclear Weapons

Bush canceled plans for further modernizing NATO nuclear weapons in Europe. “As democracy comes to Eastern Europe and Soviet troops return home, there is less need for nuclear systems of the shortest range,” he said.

Hostages

Bush expressed hope that Iran views recent U.S. efforts as gestures of goodwill and said “there may be other things we can do” to help expedite the release of captive Americans in Lebanon.

Lithuania

Bush said he had no qualms about meeting with Lithuania’s prime minister, even though the United States has not recognized the republic as an independent nation. He also sees no U.S. role in its bid to break from Moscow.

Soviet Union

Bush said that vocal opposition, such as the jeering directed at Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev during the May Day parade in Red Square, is something the Kremlin leader had better get used to. “That’s the fruits of democracy,” Bush said. “He’s just learning.”

LANCE MISSILE * Type: Surface-to-surface short-range guided missile. * Warhead: Nuclear or conventional * Range: 81 miles * Length: 20 ft., 1 in. * Diameter: 22 in. * Weight: 3,366 lbs. * Speed: Mach 3 * First in Service: 1972