Soviets to Make Surprise Cuts in Nuclear Forces : Arms control: The unilateral move will slash short-range weapons in Central Europe. The U.S. welcomes the unexpected announcement.

The Soviet Union will withdraw 1,500 nuclear warheads from Central Europe this year as part of a unilateral slash in short-range forces, Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze announced Tuesday, taking by surprise both Secretary of State James A. Baker III and a Soviet spokesman.

Shevardnadze, speaking to a human rights conference here, said Moscow will remove 60 tactical nuclear launchers and 250 units of atomic artillery from Central Europe before the end of the year in addition to the cutback in warheads.

He added that Moscow will soon withdraw 140 nuclear missile launchers and 3,200 “atomic guns,” apparently a reference to nuclear artillery shells. He did not try to reconcile the figures.

Baker, who met for two hours with Shevardnadze later in the day, welcomed the announcement, which he said would reduce but not eliminate a substantial Soviet numerical advantage over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in short-range nuclear weaponry. He said Washington is asked to do nothing in return.

Although Shevardnadze assured reporters that the planned reductions were all new ones, previously unannounced, few details were made public. Vitaly I. Churkin, an adviser to the foreign minister who often serves as his spokesman, said he first learned of the plan from Shevardnadze’s speech and did not know where the weapons were located or what would be done with them.

Churkin, a fluent English speaker often dispatched to try to put a Soviet “spin” on complicated stories, would say only, “That is a good question--I wish I knew” when reporters pressed for details.

Baker, who met extensively with Shevardnadze during the Washington summit that ended only two days earlier, was asked if he and his Soviet counterpart had made any progress in their meeting Tuesday in any area of superpower relations.

“I think we did,” he replied.

Both Baker and Shevardnadze hinted that they had inched closer to an agreement on German unification, perhaps the most perplexing issue on the Washington-Moscow agenda. But they were very reticent in discussing details.

In his speech, Shevardnadze said that decisions made at a Warsaw Pact meeting in Moscow this week and at a NATO summit in London later this month could hold the key to removing Soviet objections to a unified Germany obtaining full membership in NATO.

“On the agenda of both meetings is a transformation of the alliances” from primarily military to broadly political organizations, Shevardnadze said. He said that a future agreement between the pacts might reassure Moscow that German membership in NATO would not be a threat to Soviet security.

It was the first time that the Soviet Union had made public its proposal for closer ties between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Baker said earlier that Soviet officials floated such a suggestion during the summit but failed to spell it out.

Asked after his meeting with Shevardnadze if he had found out just what the Soviets were proposing, Baker said he now had “a little bit better idea.” But when reporters asked if he could explain it, he replied, “No, I can’t.”

Shevardnadze, standing at Baker’s side said, “I made some proposals . . . but they were not for publication. In the wake of the Washington meeting, we need to do some homework.”

Earlier in the day, Baker admitted that he was puzzled by Shevardnadze’s offer of a unilateral reduction of Soviet short-range nuclear forces.

“We don’t know whether the weapons to be removed were going to be removed in any event as a consequence of troop reductions that have already been announced,” Baker said.

When asked after the meeting if he was in a better position to explain the Soviet initiative, Baker turned to Shevardnadze and said it is up to the Soviet minister to do the explaining.

“These are new figures,” Shevardnadze said. “These seem to be quite impressive figures.”

In his speech, Shevardnadze linked the Soviet moves with a decision announced last month by President Bush to terminate a project to modernize NATO’s short-range Lance nuclear missile. He said both actions will promote peace and stability.

Shevardnadze said the Soviet reduction is intended to create a favorable climate for new U.S.-Soviet negotiations to limit short-range nuclear forces. He called for the talks to begin this fall.

NATO wants to finish the negotiations on reduction of troops and conventional--or non-nuclear--weapons in Europe before turning to the short-range nuclear question. The conventional forces negotiations are expected to take most of the rest of this year at least.

In his speech to the opening session of a three-week meeting on human rights of the 35-nation Conference on Security in Cooperation in Europe, Shevardnadze struck a conciliatory tone, a sharp contrast to past years when Moscow denounced any criticism of its human rights practices as interference in its internal affairs.

“There was a time when we used to present accounts to each other and demand that the others’ accounts be paid, not our own,” he said. But he said that Moscow is now ready to put its own human rights record on international display.

He called for the creation of international groups to “prevent, not just take note of, violations of human rights.” He gave no indication of how such organizations would operate, however.

Further, Shevardnadze endorsed a plan, first advanced by the United States and Britain, to empower the conference, often called the Helsinki process because it first met in the Finnish capital 15 years ago, to appoint observers to ensure the openness and fairness of elections in any of the member nations.