Soviet Freeze Chills Pact on Cuts in Conventional Forces : Arms control: A treaty by the end of 1990 appears unlikely as the Kremlin watches its alliance disintegrate.

The Soviet Union’s virtual freeze on negotiations toward a landmark treaty to reduce conventional armed forces in Europe raises serious doubts that the agreement can be concluded on schedule this year, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

In recent weeks, Soviet diplomats at the talks on non-nuclear forces in Vienna have politely refused to discuss possible compromises on major issues, Western negotiators said. And last week, when Secretary of State James A. Baker III pressed several proposals during a visit to Moscow, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze was “not able to respond meaningfully,” Baker said.

“The basic problem is that the agreement may not give them very much anymore,” a senior Administration official said. He said it appears “increasingly unlikely” that the pact can be concluded by the end of 1990, the deadline set by President Bush.

“The Soviets appear to be reassessing their entire strategic position,” another aide said.

The heart of the problem, senior officials said, is that the Soviet Union’s military and political position in Europe has changed radically since the conventional forces talks began a little more than a year ago.

When the conference on conventional forces in Europe, known as CFE, opened in Vienna in March, 1989, the Soviet Union was the unquestioned leader of a solid military alliance, the Warsaw Pact.

Now that alliance is rapidly disintegrating. Soviet armed forces are being pushed out of East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary with or without a CFE agreement, and Soviet leaders say their most pressing security concern is the prospect of a resurgent, unified Germany allied with the West.

“When CFE began, it was an alliance-to-alliance agreement--and they no longer have one,” the senior official said. “And it’s now caught up in the German issue. The Soviets may want to use CFE as a way to negotiate limits on the German army.”

Administration officials said they will mount a determined effort in talks with Soviet experts scheduled to begin in Washington today to push the Soviets toward compromise on the remaining issues in the conventional forces.

But several senior officials confessed that they do not know how deep the Soviet resistance to an early agreement may be, or how long the current reassessment in Moscow may last.

Several officials involved in negotiating the treaty said it is so complex--embracing 23 countries and five major categories of weapons--that unless its basic terms are completed by midsummer, the end-of-year deadline will become out of reach.

And some said any further delay will bring into question whether the agreement can be concluded in its present form at all.

“The further it goes, the less likely it is that (an agreement) is going to be signed . . . ever,” one official said.

Several officials said the freeze appears to stem in part from a more assertive mood in the Soviet military establishment as it has assessed the full impact of the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

“The Soviet military was tired of getting rolled,” one U.S. Army analyst suggested, referring to Gorbachev’s string of concessions to the West on arms-control issues.

But other, more optimistic officials suggested that the slowdown could simply reflect a Soviet desire to squeeze the West for some concessions, especially limits on the armed forces of the new, unified Germany.

“The Soviet way of negotiating since Peter the Great has been to stand firm and let us come to them,” said one Western diplomat at the talks in Vienna. “This could be a return to that.”

NATO officials meeting in Brussels rejected Soviet proposals for an agreement to limit Germany’s armed forces as part of the current negotiations over the terms of German reunification. But they said they have told the Soviets that such limits can be negotiated within CFE--perhaps in a new round of conventional talks that could begin after the initial pact is completed.

The West is holding out several other incentives to try to persuade Moscow to compromise in CFE talks. Among these are negotiations to reduce short-range nuclear weapons on the continent and a meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, both of which Gorbachev has sought.

The conventional forces talks were originally designed to bring the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization down to lower, equal levels of military strength on the continent.

That would be a major strategic and diplomatic achievement for the West. Since World War II, the Soviet Bloc enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in conventional armies over NATO. Under the outlines of a CFE agreement negotiated so far, the Warsaw Pact would give up at least 45% of its weaponry and troops, and NATO would give up between 7% and 15%, until both sides reached equal levels.

For example, the two sides agreed to reduce their armored forces to 20,000 tanks each. That would mean a cut of 62% from the Warsaw Pact’s current tank force of 52,600, and a cut of 15% from NATO’s force of 23,600, according to NATO figures.

However, several issues remain deadlocked. One is the number of tactical aircraft each side could keep. Another is how large the armed forces of any one nation could be within its alliance--an issue that, under NATO proposals, could limit the Soviet army to no more than 60% of the Warsaw Pact total.

Soviet negotiators have noticeably dug in their heels on this issue in recent weeks, diplomats in Vienna said. “There are some easy, logical compromises . . . but they won’t talk about them,” one official said.

Equally troubling to U.S. officials, there are signs that the Soviet military has begun objecting more strongly to the idea of destroying the tanks and other weapons that are to be demobilized, a key part of CFE.

But the greatest obstacle to negotiations, several officials said, is that the Soviets simply haven’t made up their minds yet.

“They don’t know what they want,” said one official.

“If I had to guess, I think they’ll finally recognize that the options are bad either way, but that they’re better off concluding a deal,” he said. “It’s a prerequisite for further steps in creating a European security arrangement, which they want.”

Times staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this story.