NATO Unveils a New Look : Allies Vow Less Troops, Nuclear Cuts

The NATO allies pledged today to sharply reduce both nuclear and conventional defenses in Europe, extending “the hand of friendship” to Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the rest of Eastern Europe.

President Bush hailed the outcome of the summit as “a historic turning point.” He said Gorbachev could use the summit’s ending declaration “to convince others” that the Soviets need not fear the West at a time when they find themselves weakened economically and in military retreat.

“NATO now has a new international vocation, a political vocation,” Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said.

With a joint statement titled “The London Declaration on a Transformed North Atlantic Alliance,” the 16 NATO heads of state ended a two-day summit intended to adapt the 41-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization to changing European realities.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher termed the document “a landmark in the history of NATO and of Europe.”

Solemnly, Bush and his 15 Western alliance partners assured the Soviet leader, who is under attack from left and right at the 28th Communist Party Congress in Moscow, that they hold “no aggressive intentions” and “will never in any circumstance be the first to use force.”

In Moscow, Gorbachev said he was ready to accept the leaders’ invitation to address a meeting of the Western alliance, probably in December. And Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov said, “We welcome the results of the (NATO) session.”

But Gorbachev could take little comfort from Bush’s comment that he had “big problems” with the idea of direct Western economic aid to the Soviet Union--a subject likely to dominate the Houston economic summit where Bush and many of the other Western leaders were flying after the NATO meeting.

In London, the allies agreed to shrink their arsenal of battlefield nuclear weapons--in tandem with Soviet action--and relegate them to highly unlikely last-resort use.

They also said, in their windup communique, that “once negotiations begin on short-range nuclear forces, the alliance will propose, in return for reciprocal action by the Soviet Union, the elimination of all its nuclear artillery shells from Europe.”

They also decided to field smaller and restructured ground forces, in the newest sign that NATO’s 40-year job of containing potential Soviet-bloc aggression was nearing a successful end.

One shift in NATO doctrine, away from a quarter-century threat to use nuclear weapons promptly if attacked, drew most of the notice. More subtle but also significant was the decision to abandon the strategy of massing troops against the East-West frontier, switching to smaller mobile units farther back.

“Allied leaders will have maximum flexibility in deciding how to respond to a crisis,” the communique said.

And, in a surprise move designed to allay one of Gorbachev’s deepest concerns, the NATO allies agreed to set a limit on the size of Germany’s military forces. That could mean a cut of more than 160,000 soldiers from the combined troops of East and West Germany after merger.