Cruise Missile Limits Approved : Arms talks: Superpower negotiators clear the way for a treaty. They agree to halt production of chemical weapons. But the debate on conventional arms is stalled.

The United States and the Soviet Union reached agreement Saturday on limiting air- and sea-launched cruise missiles, a key issue in a new treaty that will substantially reduce the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals.

Secretary of States James A. Baker III, concluding four days of intense negotiations with Soviet leaders, said that difficult compromises were required but that the agreements clear the way for a treaty this year and would open negotiations for a subsequent treaty on reducing strategic arms.

President Bush is expected to sign a joint declaration on the fundamental elements of the new treaty with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as the centerpiece of the Soviet-American summit meeting next week in Washington.

Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze said that although a number of difficult issues remain, largely concerned with ensuring the two countries’ compliance with the proposed pact, he is “confident now that the treaty on reducing strategic arms can be prepared for signature before the end of this year.”

The treaty is expected to reduce by 30% or 35% the number of nuclear weapons the two superpowers have.

The superpowers also reached an agreement on halting the production of chemical weapons and destroying 80% of their present stockpiles of such weapons. Following an international treaty outlawing chemical arms, they would proceed with the stage-by-stage destruction of the rest of their stockpiles.

Baker called this accord on chemical arms “a trailblazing agreement” that would “provide a real pathway toward a global ban on horrific weapons that we already know from bitter experience actually get used.” Its signing will be another summit highlight.

Soviet and U.S. negotiators also concluded protocols that will implement two treaties, originally agreed upon 15 years ago, limiting the size of underground nuclear tests and of nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes. The protocols provide for the treaties’ verification, including on-site inspection.

And an agreement was worked out on cooperation in preventing the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons and the spread of the technology required to develop and manufacture missiles.

But no progress was reported on reducing conventional armed forces in Europe. Negotiations in this area, now under way in Vienna, remain in “gridlock,” Baker said, apparently because of Soviet reluctance to move until the future political and military status of a reunified Germany is settled.

In Texas, Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, said that the Soviets are “stonewalling” on the conventional forces talks. But the two sides had achieved a breakthrough in Mosocw on strategic arms, he told reporters traveling with the President en route to a commencement address at the University of Texas. Some “minor things” remain to be settled, he said, but “not treaty stoppers.”

Baker said he had discussed a variety of other issues--German reunification, regional conflicts in Afghanistan and Central America, Jewish emigration and Lithuania’s bid for independence from the Soviet Union--in final preparation for the Washington summit.

“These have been some of the most intensive discussions we have had with our Soviet counterparts during this Administration,” Baker told a press conference. “In short, we have been engaged in some heavy lifting to lock in agreements by the time of the summit between President Bush and President Gorbachev.”

Shevardnadze said that the agreements on a number of difficult arms control issues had laid the basis for further Soviet-American rapprochement at the Bush-Gorbachev summit meeting.

“Final decisions and solutions in principle were found here with respect to many issues,” he said at a separate press conference. “We can now say that the state visit of President Gorbachev will constitute an important and fruitful phase in the development of the Soviet-American dialogue.”

The Moscow negotiations were on the verge of breakdown several times as the carefully balanced compromises were upset by new elements.

“This was not really easy to achieve--I won’t conceal it,” Shevardnadze said of the strategic arms agreements. “At this final stage, talks and negotiations take on their own characteristics. Any progress forward is achieved by reaching balanced decisions, creating packages.

“There were points when it seemed that our packages were about to fall apart,” he continued. “It is very important in situations like this not to yield to panic or become desperate but to continue to persist and move forward.”

Although the breakthroughs were achieved in Baker’s five hours of talks with Gorbachev on Friday, he and Shevardnadze met late into the evening, put their teams of negotiators into all-night bargaining sessions and then resumed their own meetings on Saturday, delaying Baker’s departure by eight hours.

The toughest issues, Baker said, were the limits to be imposed on air-launched cruise missiles under the new treaty and on a way to limit the deployment of sea-launched cruise missiles.

The sea-launched missiles will not be included in the treaty but will be covered by politically binding declarations limiting the number of such missiles to 880 for each side and setting their maximum range at 600 kilometers (about 375 miles).

This formula establishes a limit on sea-launched cruise missiles, as demanded by Moscow, but keeps it outside the treaty and thus not subject to verification, which Washington had insisted would be impossible without disclosing which ships carried the weapons.

The limit of 880 missiles imposes no real restriction, since the United States had planned to deploy no more than 760 and the Soviet Union probably fewer. Each nation will inform the other every year of the number of missiles it has deployed and the number it expects to deploy over the next five years.

The compromise, concluded in the negotiations Saturday, runs along the same lines as the one reached in February. But that had appeared to unravel last month as Moscow weighed the whole package and concluded it was giving more than it was getting on key issues.

To reach the compromise required on air-launched cruise missiles, the United States agreed to the range of 375 miles wanted by the Soviet Union after Moscow agreed that a new, conventionally armed U.S. missile, known as Tacit Rainbow and employing stealth technology that makes it hard to detect, would be exempted from the limits despite its longer range.

The negotiators also worked out a series of complicated rules on how to count cruise missiles that might be carried by long-range bombers.

A number of issues remain to be resolved before the joint declaration can be signed, U.S. and Soviet officials said, and a team of Soviet negotiators will go to Washington at midweek to continue the talks. In Geneva, U.S. and Soviet negotiators will be asked to complete the drafting of the statement of objectives for the next strategic arms treaty. And at least four months will be needed to finish negotiating this treaty, the officials added.

The issues still unresolved concern verification of both countries’ compliance with the agreed limits, with ways to prevent any circumvention of the treaty, and limits on some weapons, including the Soviet Union’s Backfire bomber.

“The primary issues were the ones that we wound up ultimately resolving,” Baker said. “These have been issues that have been very vexing in these negotiations for a long, long time.”

Shevardnadze said these agreements were “really the main result” of the four days of talks, and he praised Baker’s determination to get an agreement and what he called his “high professionalism” in the difficult negotiations.

Baker expressed disappointment that no progress was made on reducing conventional armed forces in Europe, saying that the United States had put forward proposals on key issues in the hope of obtaining an early agreement and holding an all-European summit by the end of the year.

Shevardnadze said that the Soviet Union needs time to study the U.S. proposals and review them with other members of the Warsaw Pact.

But he made it clear that Moscow is not likely to move until its security is assured in the wake of German reunification, and Soviet leaders discussed those issues extensively with Baker.

“The formation of all-European security structures might speed up the process of German unification and the development of the required security for everyone,” Shevardnadze said.

“But German unification is the problem of problems. It is a very complicated and difficult issue. . . . We find totally unacceptable the idea of the entry of a unified Germany into NATO. We must search for a solution that will meet both the interests of the Soviet Union and the West,” the Soviet foreign minister added.

Cruise Missiles

An article by retired Vice Adm. John M. Lee on reductions in sea-launched cruise missiles appears on Page 7 of today’s Opinion section. It went to press before Saturday’s announcement in Moscow of a preliminary U.S.-Soviet agreement on this type of weapon.