Kremlin Warns U.S. of Tough Weapons Talks

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who arrived here Tuesday for four days of negotiations with Soviet leaders on arms control issues, will find the bargaining tougher than the United States has come to expect from President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Kremlin officials warned.

While hopeful that progress can be made on agreements reducing the two superpowers’ strategic arsenals and cutting back conventional forces in Europe, Soviet officials said that Gorbachev has gone about as far as he can without significant U.S. concessions.

“The era of the cheap compromise is over,” a senior Soviet foreign policy specialist said, “and we have already done about all we dare do unilaterally. The next moves will require some difficult decisions for both sides.”

While denying that Gorbachev has buckled under pressure from the Soviet military and conservatives within the Communist Party leadership, Soviet officials acknowledge a new firmness--much commented upon in the West--in Moscow’s approach to arms control negotiations.

“We have spoiled the Americans in arms control, and they now expect endless unilateral concessions,” Leonid Dobrokhotov, a senior party official, commented in advance of the Baker visit. “But we have reached the bottom line, the line beyond which unilateral moves cannot be made, the line at which the United States will have to match us.”

The outlook for Baker’s talks with Gorbachev and Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, is consequently more somber than at previous rounds of negotiations, and the success of the summit meeting between President Bush and Gorbachev in Washington starting May 30 is at stake.

While promising “flexibility” and readiness to move on key issues, a senior U.S. official traveling with Baker said the U.S. side would be “bitterly disappointed” if these talks did not restore agreements that American negotiators believed they had won on sea-launched and air-launched cruise missiles only to find that Moscow had apparently retreated.

“This is a major litmus test by any standard,” the U.S. official commented, asking not to be quoted by name. “It would be very disturbing if they were not willing to go back to what we had in February.”

For both sides, the restrictions to be placed on the sea- and air-launched cruise missiles--the number each side may have, how they will be counted, what range they may have-- are central to the conclusion of a strategic arms reduction treaty.

There are also serious differences over mobile missiles with multiple warheads and on heavy, land-based missiles.

Agreement also must be reached on means to verify each side’s compliance with the proposed treaty, which itself is a highly complex and sensitive issue.

Soviet officials in recent days have seemed less apprehensive than their U.S. counterparts about the possibility of falling well short of even the reduced goals they have set for the arms talks.

“We will go as far as we can in these talks, and it may not be that far because we will not go for an agreement for its own sake,” a Soviet arms specialist said. “Then, at the summit, we will seek what agreement we can on the outstanding issues and perhaps on principles for the next stage. A smaller agreement is better than a bad agreement.”

U.S. officials, expressing hope that some issues can be resolved here this week and others agreed to in principle at the summit, said that the strategic arms negotiators for the two countries will resume work in Geneva on Monday and will continue through the summer.

Also on the agenda for the Baker visit are the negotiations in Vienna between members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact on reducing conventional armed forces in Central Europe and future arrangements for European security after the unification of Germany.

“We cannot simply let Germany slide by--for us it is key,” commented Andrei Kortunov, a foreign policy specialist at the United States of America and Canada Institute here. “We know we are not going to war and can assume that a strategic arms agreement will be worked out. That is an issue left from yesterday.

“The future of Germany, the shape of the new Europe and its security structure--these are the issues of tomorrow. They are also issues we feel much more now.”

In addition, U.S. and Soviet officials will discuss a wide range of other questions--human rights, trade, regional conflicts, space cooperation and international issues, including terrorism and narcotics trafficking--to prepare the agenda for the Bush-Gorbachev summit.

The secession efforts by the Soviet Union’s three Baltic republics--Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania--will also be discussed, U.S. and Soviet officials said.

Their drive to recover the independence they enjoyed between the two world wars has added to the domestic crises facing Gorbachev and has become a potential issue in Soviet-American relations.

“To ensure success in Washington in two weeks, there must be real progress in the talks with Baker,” a Soviet Foreign Ministry official said. “These talks will have a big, even decisive role.”

Who must move first and who must make the greater concessions to achieve last-minute compromises are naturally contentious issues in themselves, and each side is maneuvering to place the onus on the other.

“We have serious expectations for a series of agreements on disarmament,” a senior Soviet foreign policy official said in advance of the Baker visit, requesting that he not be quoted by name, “but the current U.S. proposals do not take into account our national security. They are fine for the U.S., but not for us. There is no balance. . . . We thus are placing great hopes on the talks with Baker.”

Although many factors are involved, the Soviet Union’s multiple crises--economic, political and ethnic--have restricted Gorbachev’s ability to maneuver and put him under mounting pressure to ensure the country’s national security, according to senior Soviet officials.

In the view of many Gorbachev supporters, including senior officials in the government and party, the Soviet president must balance himself and all he does very carefully to ensure the success of perestroika, his program of political and economic restructuring, and his own survival as a political leader.

“For Gorbachev, just as for Bush, any agreement we reach must be ratifiable,” said Dobrokhotov, the senior party official. “That means it must be clearly in our national interests, and our security must be enhanced by it. The cost--what we give up--moreover, must be balanced and fair, for us as well as to the United States, and it must be perceived that way. . . .”

The point, made repeatedly by Soviet officials, is that Gorbachev must win approval not only within the party’s ruling Politburo and its Central Committee but from the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, before any arms control treaty is signed, and an agreement perceived as one-sided will face strong opposition.

“People in the United States should remember that Gorbachev is not a ruler in the Stalinist mold, that he has constituencies, that he must deal with contending forces,” Prof. Vitaly I. Goldansky, director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Physical Chemistry and a Gorbachev adviser on arms control, said in an interview Tuesday. “He let that genie of democracy out of the bottle, and he has to take into account the views of others.”

Those views now include outspoken, even harsh criticism from the far right and from some ranking officers of the Soviet military of much of Gorbachev’s foreign policy, including the unilateral troop reductions now under way, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia and Hungary and some of the terms already agreed upon in the strategic arms reduction talks.

“Gorbachev has had to show increased firmness to deal with our multiple, compounded crises, and you cannot be tough in one sphere and soft in another,” one Soviet political commentator remarked.

“And, as much as we want better relations with the United States and arms control agreements, the future of perestroika and Gorbachev’s continued leadership take precedence because they are the key to everything else.”