THE WASHINGTON SUMMIT: Dealing with the New Reality : Gorbachev Is Facing Tough Soviet Critics of Arms Agreement : Missiles: Foes are asking why Moscow will give up more nuclear weapons than Washington.

The negotiations with the United States on reducing the two superpowers’ strategic arsenals have been difficult, but Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will face an equally tough task selling that agreement at home.

Already, his countrymen are asking why the Soviet Union will give up more weapons than the United States, why the United States will have more nuclear warheads than the Soviet Union, and why Moscow dropped its demand that sea-launched cruise missiles be fully covered by the prospective treaty.

The questions are coming not only from Gorbachev’s critics on the right, but also from some of his supporters. And it appears likely that the agreement signed Friday by Gorbachev and President Bush will provoke the Soviet Union’s first full-scale foreign policy debate.

“The gap in the numbers makes one stop and think,” Alexander Bovin, a political commentator for the government newspaper Izvestia, said before the two leaders approved the agreement, which sets out basic principles for a treaty reducing strategic arms. “Why are we agreeing to have considerably fewer warheads in our strategic offensive arsenal than the Americans?”

Marshal Dmitri T. Yazov, the Soviet defense minister, complained in print last month that the country’s negotiating style seems tilted more toward making concessions than toward winning compromises from the other side. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact, he warned, made it too risky to yield much on strategic arms without offsetting reductions by the United States.

And Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, Gorbachev’s own military adviser, a consultant on the strategic arms negotiations and a member of the Soviet delegation to the summit talks here, argued publicly in advance of Gorbachev’s trip that the country needs a modernized, more powerful army and must be wary about reducing its defense capabilities.

“The danger of war has not been eliminated for the Soviet Union--I am convinced of this and I speak of it frankly,” Akhromeyev wrote in a lengthy attack on another Gorbachev adviser, Georgy A. Arbatov, director of the U.S.A. and Canada Institute in Moscow. “The United States continues to act largely as before in the military sphere. . . .”

With such questions being raised by his own supporters, Gorbachev will find it difficult to justify making any concessions that are not matched by U.S. concessions.

“If the United States wants an agreement, and I know it does, then the American negotiators will have to take into account our public opinion,” Vitaly I. Goldansky, a leading Soviet scientist and an adviser to Gorbachev on arms control, said of the prospective treaty. “We are used to tailoring agreements to meet American political needs, but now you must take our needs into consideration.

“This is really new. In the past, the leader made a deal, and that was it. Now we have a real diversity in opinion, we have open criticism of the leadership and its policies and, yes, we have a political opposition that is emerging. Neither foreign policy nor defense will be exempt from political debate,” he said.

Gorbachev’s conservative critics have recently focused on foreign policy as an area of vulnerability.

One foreign policy specialist, writing in the weekly newspaper Literaturnaya Rossiya in April, said that all of Gorbachev’s international achievements had come by yielding the gains made by the Soviet Union over the past 50 years.

Yegor K. Ligachev, the foremost conservative within the Communist Party leadership, has publicly questioned Soviet policy in Eastern Europe.

“People speak with great alarm about what is happening in Eastern Europe,” Ligachev said in a television interview two weeks ago. “In particular, many people say they are very disturbed that there is a dismantling of socialism in some of those countries.”

And the growing public feud between Akhromeyev and Arbatov has brought into the open the deep cleavage among Gorbachev’s own advisers over substituting political agreements for military readiness and over his concept of “defense sufficiency”--that is, ensuring the country’s defense against any conceivable threat but without seeking to compete weapon for weapon with the United States in a ruinous arms race.

“The debate that we will have over the START treaty will range over all our foreign policy initiatives under Gorbachev,” a member of the Soviet delegation commented. “But it is impossible to predict the outcome. This is the first such fundamental debate we will have had, and our legislators are distinguishing themselves by their independence.”

Under Soviet law, treaties must be ratified by the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, but the process will no longer be the mere formality that it was two years ago when the treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear forces was reviewed and approved in an afternoon.

The three parliamentary committees that will review arms control agreements are filled with foreign policy specialists, generals, managers of the country’s defense industries and others certain to probe for any weaknesses. Elected in the nation’s first contested parliamentary elections last year, they have already shown their independence from the government and Communist Party and openly questioned some of Gorbachev’s policies.

Talking with U.S. congressional leaders here Friday, Gorbachev compared the new role Soviet legislators were playing.

“It is a really a mirror image (of Washington) now,” he said. “We have come here, and before coming here, we had contacts with our Supreme Soviet members, and we will have contacts with them when we return.”

But the framework agreement for the strategic arms treaty, signed by Gorbachev and President Bush on Friday, already has drawn criticism from both the right and the left in Moscow.

“The progressives, the radicals are saying that the cuts are not large enough and certainly do not reach the 50% levels we were promised,” Andrei Kortunov, an arms control specialist at the U.S.A. Institute now in Washington, commented. “We are not going to get the savings we need from the defense budget because we will have to rebuild our strategic triad to match that of the U.S. Their criticism is that we have been trapped into playing the U.S. game once again.

“From the right, we hear very strong criticism that we are giving up more than the U.S. is, that we have not held fast on such critical points as the inclusion of the sea-launched cruise missile where the U.S. enjoys an advantage, but we have been all too ready to ‘split the difference’ with the Americans in ways that weaken us.”

The next six months of negotiations, as the final treaty is prepared and the basis is laid for a second agreement, will be crucial for Gorbachev, according to Kortunov and other Soviet foreign policy specialists.

“Even as we celebrate this framework agreement, we must remember that a lot of work still needs to be done to produce a treaty that can be ratified by both the U.S. Senate and our Supreme Soviet,” a member of the Soviet delegation said. “To produce a treaty that either body would refuse to ratify would be disastrous for the whole process of arms control and for the overall relationship.”

THE SUMMIT

What kind of arms control agreements would help Gorbachev with his domestic problems? Can they be sold to the Soviet military and other Soviet conservatives?

There is a big limit to the help he can get from arms control agreements. What the Soviet people are focusing on politically is the internal problems. And the climate has become less favorable for selling arms control to the military.

For both the political and military leadership in the Soviet Union, the changes in Eastern Europe have led to a desire to put things on hold. What would be most important to Gorbachev would be for the United States and the West to cut back their forces unilaterally. That would demonstrate to his rivals that Gorbachev’s policies are being reciprocated.

The strongest thing Gorbachev has going for him at home is that he is an internationally recognized leader. He is seen as dealing on equal terms with the President of the United States, and that was not true of his predecessors. Beyond that, it’s not clear that the average Soviet citizen--the person standing in line waiting to buy bread--is likely to pay much attention to the specifics of an arms control agreement.

But there are certain things it would be imprudent for him to do at this stage. The military would not have supported the (U.S.-backed) proposal to exclude medium-range cruise missiles from the agreement. And it would be hard for him to sell the military on any deal preventing modernization of the remaining SS-18s (ballistic missiles). If the United States persists in such a course, that might be very imprudent.