Further Nuclear Role for Germany Seen : Europe: NATO chief Manfred Woerner says the western sector must remain an arsenal for U.S. weapons.

With Western leaders puzzling over a new role for the 41-year-old Atlantic Alliance, the secretary general of NATO insisted Monday that the western sector of the unified Germany must serve as an arsenal for U.S. nuclear weapons.

“It would be very bad if Germany would be de-nuclearized,” said Manfred Woerner, the senior executive of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, after meeting with President Bush on the agenda of a hastily summoned NATO summit. The organization is struggling to come up with new strategic plans in the wake of the fall of communism throughout much of what had been the Eastern Bloc of Soviet allies.

“We are in favor of reducing nuclear weapons to an absolute minimum,” Woerner said. At the same time, he added, “We have to reaffirm some essential principles--we cannot renounce nuclear weapons.”

However, Woerner, who served as West Germany’s defense minister until he became NATO’s secretary general, said a united Germany will have to decide for itself whether it wants nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, White House officials said that although a date for the summit has not been set, U.S. officials and those from other Western nations are considering holding the meeting in London on July 5 and 6.

On May 30, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev arrives in Washington to meet with President Bush, and on July 11, the leaders of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and West Germany will meet in Houston for the annual summit of the leading industrial democracies.

In addition, a NATO summit in early July would follow what is expected to be a crucial congress of the Soviet Communist Party in late June.

Joint U.S.-Soviet planning for the Washington summit has been under way here since Thursday, when a 12-member team of Soviet officials arrived, toured the White House and Andrews Air Force Base--where Gorbachev will arrive--and began discussions about the meeting sites and agenda.

The NATO summit, a White House official said, is being called to discuss “where NATO is going and how they’re going to get there.” It is intended to focus on how NATO, whose most visible role has been that of a military alliance countering the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, can evolve into a more political organization, the official said.

The No. 1 topic, he said, will be to determine how the alliance “approaches its task in light of this reduced threat from the Warsaw Pact and the potential of fewer U.S. troops” in Western Europe.

At the heart of such debate is the near certainty that in coming years, the strength of U.S. forces in Europe will undergo dramatic reduction--a direct result of Soviet withdrawals anticipated in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said Bush and Woerner reviewed the likely agenda for the summit. The President has said it will include the future political mission for NATO, the alliance’s conventional arms control objectives, the role of the U.S. nuclear force in Europe and the future of the 35-nation, East-West Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Woerner, referring to the pressures on NATO to adjust to the dramatic shifts taking place in Eastern Europe, said after meeting with Bush, “We are looking at this alliance not as an instrument of confrontation, but as an element of cooperation in a new security structure.”

He spoke strongly against any move to let NATO wither.

Times staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this report.