Gorbachev Says He’s Ready to Join in Symbolically Burying Cold War : Kremlin: Soviet leader hails West’s changes in strategy. NATO gave him ammunition against his foes, spokesman says.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, invited by NATO leaders to join them for a meeting symbolizing the burial of the Cold War, said Friday that he is ready to go, and he hailed changes that the West made in its strategy at a time when his conduct of foreign policy is coming under fierce criticism at home.

With its own military alliance in danger of disintegration, the Kremlin also invited Manfred Woerner, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to Moscow for talks that state-run television said should deal with arms control and the narrowing gap between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

At their summit meeting in London, President Bush and the other leaders of the 16-nation Atlantic Alliance offered Moscow and the East European countries a formal declaration of peace to mark the end of the East-West divide in Europe and invited Gorbachev to NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Asked by reporters for comment during a break at a national Communist Party Congress, Gorbachev said, “I would always be ready to go,” but he noted that he had not yet received a formal invitation from Bush or the other Western leaders.

“We welcome the beginning of the coming together of the two blocs,” the Soviet president told journalists in the Kremlin. “It’s a difficult process. Everyone knows how difficult it is to move away from stereotypes.”

Gorbachev’s five-year record in Soviet foreign policy has come under intense criticism from some of the almost 4,700 congress delegates, with top military brass accusing him Thursday of having lost Eastern Europe without firing a shot.

Gennady I. Gerasimov, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the NATO summit had given Gorbachev timely ammunition to use in his battle with generals and admirals who charge that he has frittered away the geopolitical gains obtained at the cost of millions of Soviet lives in World War II.

“Now we can tell them they are wrong. . . . This has come at a good time because he is being criticized,” Gerasimov said.

In what may have been the most important NATO meeting since the alliance was founded in 1949 to stem the expansion of Soviet-sponsored Communist regimes in postwar Europe, Western leaders agreed to use nuclear weapons only as a last resort, offered to remove its nuclear artillery shells from Europe if the Soviet Union does the same, said they are willing to limit troop levels in a united Germany and accepted an enhanced role for such organizations as the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, said approvingly that those decisions “pave the way to a safe future for the entire European Continent.” He cautioned, however, that NATO’s declaration of intent must be backed up with “specific deeds.”

A top Kremlin official for international affairs seemed decidedly cool, though he said he was still waiting for a full account of the London meeting.

“The ‘flexible response’ doctrine adopted in 1964 (by NATO) is still valid,” Valentin M. Falin, head of the Soviet Communist Party’s International Department, told a news conference. “This implies the use of nuclear weapons against a range of targets across the Soviet Union . . . 60,000 targets on the territory of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.”

In June, the seven-member Warsaw Pact, its future now in doubt because of the pro-democracy revolutions that swept through Moscow’s former satellites in East Europe, voted to begin transforming itself into a union of equal partners focusing on political issues, in part because the Kremlin can no longer automatically command the military allegiance of other pact members.

Gerasimov told a Foreign Ministry news briefing that the London summit showed that NATO is following the Warsaw Pact’s “good example” by moving away from a posture of confrontation towards a common security structure in Europe.

Shevardnadze, in comments quoted by the official Tass news agency, said: “We attach extremely great importance to the statement that the NATO countries have no aggressive intentions and that they are committed to a peaceful solution of disputes and will never be the first to use force.”

He said the Kremlin concurred with the idea of a joint NATO-Warsaw Pact declaration “which would solemnly declare that we are no longer opponents” and said Moscow and its allies were ready to meet their one-time adversaries half-way.

“In London it was declared that the West extends its hand to the East. For our part, we are ready to extend our hand to them,” Shevardnadze said, signaling the Soviet Union’s readiness to deal. He said Woerner’s July 14 visit to Moscow, believed to be the first by a NATO secretary general, would “boost contacts” further.

The central Soviet concern in the new Europe remains the future place to be occupied by the unified state that will result from the fusion of West Germany, a NATO member, and East Germany, which belongs to the Warsaw Pact.

Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, flies to Moscow on July 15 to try to reassure the Soviets, who lost an estimated 27 million men and women in World War II, that a united Germany that is a member of NATO alone would not threaten the security balance in Europe.