W. Germans Offer Limits on Forces : Unification: Bonn is willing to negotiate the size of future army. Allies near agreement on reshaping NATO. Gorbachev may be invited to address alliance.

West Germany declared for the first time Thursday that it is willing to negotiate limits on the future military forces of a united Germany as the Western allies neared agreement on a historic declaration designed to reshape NATO and reassure the Soviet Union.

As part of their effort to convince Moscow it has nothing to fear from a unified Germany inside NATO, leaders of the alliance’s 16 member nations prepared to accept a set of proposals by President Bush that include inviting Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to address the alliance and pledging to use nuclear weapons “only as a last resort” in a conventional war in Europe.

Under present doctrine, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States have refused to rule out early use of nuclear weapons in the event of such a conflict.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, second only to Bush as a force in determining the shape that NATO will assume in response to the dramatic political changes that are transforming Europe, announced his country’s willingness to limit its own forces during the opening session of a two-day NATO summit here.

Referring to negotiations now going on in Vienna between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations over reducing conventional forces in Europe, Kohl declared, “In Vienna, the federal government will be willing to negotiate on the level of forces to be maintained by a united Germany.”

It was the first time that Kohl, who has repeatedly driven home the point that a united Germany must be accepted as a fully sovereign and equal member of the Atlantic Alliance, had agreed to cap military forces. Only last month, when Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze advanced the idea during talks on German reunification, Bonn, joined by the United States, Britain and France, the other Western governments involved in the talks, rejected the idea.

West German government sources conceded that Kohl’s new willingness to work out such limits is part of an effort to obtain Soviet acquiescence in German reunification and in a unified Germany’s belonging to NATO. Even so, German sources made it clear that a cap on its future armaments could come only as a decision by a sovereign German government, not as something imposed by Moscow or by its own allies.

While Bush and Kohl took the lead in efforts to show sensitivity to the Soviet Union’s vested interest in the NATO discussions taking place here, a West German spokesman said it was clear that “everyone wants a dramatic signal to be sent out reassuring the Soviets” that they should have no fear of a surprise attack by NATO.

In a similar vein, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said at a news briefing after the closed-door discussions at London’s historic Lancaster House:

“As the adage goes, seeing is believing. And the President proposed to give the Warsaw Pact countries a special view of NATO that could help change their perspective on our years of adversarial relations.

“He proposed to invite President Gorbachev to attend a NATO meeting and he proposed to establish some kind of liaison between the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO,” Fitzwater said. “The President said, ‘We will show that NATO has a new dimension of cooperation with the Soviet Union and with the new democracies of Eastern Europe,’ ”

A summit declaration redefining NATO’s mission and including such assurances will be issued when the leaders conclude their meetings today. Although their discussions Thursday were so free of contention that the leaders ended an afternoon session half an hour early, the final declaration is considered so important that the foreign ministers of the 16 nations worked late into the night hammering out its exact wording.

The Associated Press, quoting diplomatic sources, reported that the foreign ministers agreed early today on a 20-paragraph draft communique that includes an invitation to the Warsaw Pact to sign a mutual non-aggression agreement.

The tentative proposal “is basically stating that various countries who sign it are no longer adversaries and should refrain from threat or use of force,” one source said.

Fitzwater said the opening discussions centered on proposals that Bush had made before the summit and, while no final decisions have been made, there has been a “generally positive response” from the allies.

Bush’s proposal that Gorbachev be invited to address NATO has not yet been raised with the Soviet leader, nor have the allies yet formally agreed to such an invitation. But U.S. officials left little doubt that they expect the invitation to be extended and Gorbachev to accept.

Diplomatic sources said Gorbachev will be invited to address a session of the North Atlantic Council at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels in December. A senior U.S. official said Bush and the other Western government leaders almost certainly would attend if Gorbachev accepted.

Georgy Shakhnazarov, a personal aide to Gorbachev, said late Thursday that the Soviet leader is prepared to accept any such invitation. Shakhnazarov was interviewed on the U.S. Public Broadcasting System’s “MacNeill-Lehrer Newshour.”

Fitzwater said a Gorbachev appearance, as well as a Bush proposal that the Warsaw Pact nations be invited to establish a liaison office at NATO headquarters in Brussels, was intended to give the Soviets the kind of access to NATO that would reassure them of the alliance’s commitment to peaceful cooperation.

The proposal to alter NATO’s policy on when it would use its nuclear weapons by stipulating that they would be unleashed only as “a last resort” was agreed to in principle by all the allies, although both British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Francois Mitterrand had reservations about it. Both warned that NATO should do nothing to diminish the value of its nuclear arms as a deterrent to Soviet attack, noting that Moscow will retain enormous military power regardless of any changes the future may bring .

Bush Administration officials had been eager to paint the proposal to make atomic arms the “weapons of last resort” as a significant shift in NATO strategy, but felt compelled to backpedal when Thatcher balked at the proposed wording.

When Thatcher complained that such a declaration would weaken the alliance’s nuclear deterrent posture, U.S. officials hastened to assure her that the new phrase was principally a rhetorical gesture designed to send a conciliatory note to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

It would not, the officials assured her, change the Atlantic Alliance’s longstanding commitment to use nuclear force if Western Europe were in danger of being overrun by Soviet conventional forces.

In the end, Thatcher, the lone holdout against the “last resort” language, acceded to the Bush initiative.

In her opening statement, Thatcher said, “We are at a turning point in Europe’s history, a turning point which is as full of promise as was 1919 and 1945. And we know that it is the existence of NATO and its sure defense which have helped to change the direction of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from the dictate of government towards the democracy of the people.”

The signal from the NATO summit, she said, “must be one of resolve in defense, resolve and unity in defense, coupled with willingness to extend the hand of friendship to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.”

She also told of receiving a message from Gorbachev that British officials later described as a two-page letter expressing hope for constructive results from the NATO summit, but also expressing interest in next week’s economic summit at Houston, where the United States and six other industrialized countries--Canada, Britain, France, Italy, West Germany and Japan--are expected to discuss aid to the Soviet Union along with other economic matters.

A British spokesman said that while Gorbachev expressed an interest in receiving such aid from the allies, his letter did not request it.

The issue of aid to the Soviet Union was not raised at the summit here Thursday. The U.S. position has been that Western aid should not be extended until the Soviet Union ends its own aid in Third World trouble spots and adopts further reforms to transform its planned economy into more of a free-market system.

French officials, meanwhile, were so eager to give wide circulation to Mitterrand’s views on the reshaping of the NATO mission and his concern about the continuing Soviet military threat that they released an English translation of his opening statement, something they ordinarily do only long after an official meeting.

While Mitterrand agreed with the “spirit” of Bush’s proposals and agreed that it is time to establish new relations in Europe, he urged that in adopting a strategy for the future, NATO retain “truly a concept of deterrence, i.e., that its unambiguous objective should be to prevent the outbreak of war and not simply to try to win a war.”

“I do not think an open conflict can escape from its logical progression, namely ever greater use of arms, until the atomic bomb,” he declared.

In the evening, German officials spelled out in greater detail their position on setting limits on the military forces of a united Germany.

“For the Soviets, the future of a united Germany’s force levels is important,” commented a senior member of the West German delegation.

The Bonn government stressed, however, that it is only prepared to consider the issue in a way that would not single out Germany for punishment as a result of its defeat in World War II.

For that reason, West Germany, supported by the United States and other NATO countries, wants to cover the matter in the Vienna talks and not the so-called “two-plus-four” unification negotiations among the two German states and the four major victorious World War II powers--the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union.

“We don’t want to be singled out,” commented a member of the German delegation. “We’re thankful that the Soviets say this should be discussed in Vienna.”

Theoretically, the German troop limitation would be contained within a general agreement concerning all military forces in Central Europe, to avoid singling out Germany. However, it seems certain that in practice the limit will apply primarily to Germany.

The first round of the 23-nation conventional forces talks is expected to be concluded before the end of this year. There probably is not time enough to include a German troop limit in that round, but a ranking U.S. State Department official said the Soviet Union is demanding some sort of resolution of the German troop issue before it agrees to remove the last of its World War II occupation rights.

“The Soviets have a very substantial interest in knowing what the forces are going to be in the central region of Europe, before they agree to all of the external aspects of German unification,” the U.S. official said.

He said the limit could be included either in a supplement to the first conventional forces agreement or in immediate follow-on talks.

“You’ve got to make sure it’s a procedure that the Soviets are happy with so they’ll go forward with a final (reunification) settlement,” the official said. “There’s no difference of approach between us and the Germans.”

A leading West German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, reported earlier this week that Kohl, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Defense Minister Gerd Stoltenberg agreed in secret talks to consider limits on the united German army. The newspaper said that Stoltenberg favored a limit of 400,000 while Genscher supported a 350,000 ceiling. West Germany now has about 494,000 troops and East Germany has at least 130,000.

BACKGROUND

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization pact was signed April 4, 1949, in Washington. In it, the United States, Canada and 10 European nations--Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal--aligned themselves against any military threat from the Soviet Union. Greece, Turkey, West Germany and Spain later joined the alliance. The treaty says, “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” France, Spain and Iceland are not part of NATO’s integrated military structure.