Design for United, Peaceful Europe Unveiled by NATO : Alliance: Nuclear reliance is downgraded. Conventional forces will be modified. The Kremlin and its allies are invited to form new ties with the West.

With their 41-year-old alliance on the verge of being overtaken by history, leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization unveiled on Friday a dramatic new blueprint for the future that President Bush said charts a “new course” for a long-divided Europe and “extends the hand of friendship” to old adversaries.

“NATO has set a new path for peace,” Bush declared as a two-day summit of alliance leaders ended. “ . . . And all peoples from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the Baltic to the Adriatic can share in its promise.”

The “London Declaration on a Transformed North Atlantic Alliance,” designed to adapt the military alliance forged in the Cold War to the drastic changes sweeping Europe and the Soviet Union, spells out new policies that modify NATO’s reliance on nuclear weapons, restructures its conventional military forces and invites Moscow and the Warsaw Pact to establish permanent liaisons with NATO.

It also sets in motion a series of potentially far-reaching changes in the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, transforming an obscure diplomatic body into what is now envisioned as a major agency for fostering democracy on the continent.

The communique also contained an invitation to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Eastern European leaders to address NATO. In Moscow, Gorbachev indicated that he would accept, probably in December, and Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze welcomed the results of the session, declaring: “The decisions adopted move in the right direction and pave the way to a safe future for the entire European continent.”

Although the agreement generally tracks most of the proposals that Bush had advanced to transform the political role of the military alliance and to make it accessible to leaders of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it also contains a concession to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the question of using nuclear weapons.

On Thursday, while the NATO chiefs still were negotiating, Bush Administration officials had indicated that they expected the final declaration to contain an essentially unqualified stipulation that NATO would use nuclear weapons only as “a last resort” in the event of a conventional war.

But Thatcher argued vehemently Thursday that any statement that might raise doubts about NATO’s willingness to use nuclear weapons first is dangerous.

In deference to her view, the final communique, made public Friday, added an important condition: No change in doctrine would occur until all Soviet forces had been withdrawn from Eastern Europe and until the treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe, which is being negotiated in Vienna and is expected to be completed this fall, has been implemented.

The document also declared: “There are no circumstances in which nuclear retaliation in response to military action might be discounted.”

Despite the modification of Bush’s proposal on nuclear strategy, the final document reflects broad agreement within the alliance that both conventional war and a nuclear conflict in Europe have become far less likely.

NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner said the allies had concluded that a nuclear war had become “a far more remote possibility,” but that they wanted to retain the “war-reducing character” of its nuclear strategy.

In addition to modifying nuclear weapons policy, the final communique spelled out what are likely to become substantial changes in the character of NATO’s armed forces.

The alliance will rely increasingly on multinational corps made up of national units, and will field smaller and restructured active forces that will be highly mobile and versatile, NATO leaders said, to provide maximum flexibility in deciding how to respond to a crisis.

Moreover, NATO plans to scale back the readiness of its active units, reduce training requirements and the number of military exercises, and rely more heavily on the ability to build up larger forces when and if needed.

“As you can see,” Bush told a press conference at the conclusion of the two-day summit, “the London Declaration will bring fundamental change to every aspect of the alliance’s work. For more than 40 years, we’ve looked for this day--a day when we have already moved beyond containment, with unity on this continent overcoming division. And now that day is here, and all peoples from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the Baltic to the Adriatic can share in its promise.”

Bush, referring to the invitation extended to leaders of the East Bloc to address NATO, declared: “We say to President Gorbachev, come to NATO. We say to all the member states of the Warsaw Pact, come to NATO and establish regular diplomatic liaison with the alliance.”

While stressing that the alliance poses no offensive threat to the Soviet Union and reiterating his own strong support for Gorbachev’s reform program, Bush nonetheless emphatically rejected the idea of the United States joining West Germany in providing financial aid to Moscow.

“I have big problems with that, and I think the American people do, too,” Bush declared, noting that the Soviet Union continues to invest a substantial percentage of its gross national product in its military forces and provides $5 billion a year to support Fidel Castro’s “totalitarian regime” in Cuba.

The London Declaration, officially embracing the decision of NATO foreign ministers last December to accept a united Germany as a member of the alliance, declared that reunification would be “an indispensable factor of stability, which is needed in the heart of Europe.”

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, stressing the “stability” factor in a speech at the summit, said he is glad Germany’s immediate neighbors in the East shared that view. But he noted that “others”--mainly the Soviet Union, which he did not name--have yet to be convinced that a united Germany in NATO would be a stabilizing factor.

Kohl pledged for his part that a united Germany would respect “the legitimate security interests” of all European countries and of “our Eastern neighbors, including the Soviet Union.”

The NATO declaration commits the alliance to “do its share to overcome the legacy of decades of suspicion” between the East and West and to be “ready to intensify military contacts, including those of NATO military commanders, with Moscow and other Central and Eastern European capitals.”

The allies also proposed that military leaders from throughout Europe meet in Vienna this fall, as they did earlier this year, to talk about their forces and military doctrines and promote common understanding.

And they vowed to establish “an entirely different quality of openness in Europe, including an agreement on ‘open skies.’ ” Negotiations between NATO and Warsaw Pact nations to permit fly-overs by reconnaissance planes from each side are under way in Ottawa.

Outlining an expanded role for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the NATO document supports calling a CSCE summit in Paris later this year with the aim of signing the agreement to reduce conventional forces in Europe, if those negotiations have been completed by then.

The CSCE summit would also set standards for establishing and preserving free societies throughout the 35-nation region. Among other things, it would focus on endorsing principles about the right to free and fair elections and respect for the rule of law, as well as on formulating guidelines for improving economic cooperation, based on the development of free and competitive market economies.

At his press conference, Bush said he believes that the action taken by NATO at the summit here should convince Gorbachev and the Soviet military that the alliance does not represent a threat.

But, he noted, “Any time you sit down with people from the Soviet Union, they tell you of the fact that they lost from 20 million to 27 million lives in World War II. It’s ingrained in them. They do it not as a defensive mechanism, but they do it because they feel strongly about that.”

Bush said he hopes the Soviets will look at the changes that NATO has undertaken and will “say, ‘Well, if NATO had been a threat to us, it no longer is a threat to us,’ and then I hope we can go forward to further document that spirit by mutual agreements on arms control.”

Bush also noted that NATO Secretary General Woerner will go to Moscow next week to discuss the NATO action with Gorbachev, and said he plans to personally discuss the subject with Gorbachev by telephone within the next couple of weeks.

“I want to make some of these points here again--particularly that they ought not to view NATO as a threat and certainly ought not to view it as a roadblock to progress in arms control or withdrawal of conventional forces or whatever it might be,” Bush said.

Although Gorbachev several times has declared the Cold War to be over, Bush demurred when asked whether the summit amounted to a celebration that post-World War II era of conflict is over and that NATO had won, saying the Cold War is something he would “rather not comment on.”

“I don’t think we’re dealing in terms of victory and defeat,” Bush told reporters. “We’re dealing in terms of how do we stabilize and guarantee the peace and security of Europe?”

Concern about how Gorbachev and the Soviet military would react to the NATO action here, including the alliance’s official embrace of a unified Germany as a full-fledged NATO member, dominated much of the discussion at the summit.

West Germany’s Kohl said that issues of economic cooperation and ways to manage the transition of East and West Germany into a single state, as well as troop levels of a unified Germany, will be major topics of discussion when he meets with Gorbachev in Moscow on Sunday.

Kohl, who disclosed Thursday that West Germany is prepared to negotiate a cap on troop levels in a unified Germany, said that “this is a question we’ve got to discuss” at his meeting with Gorbachev.

Thatcher said NATO had extended an invitation for Gorbachev to speak to the alliance because “we all think in terms of President Gorbachev, because without him none of this would have happened.”

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