Gorbachev Asks NATO Security Partnership : Diplomacy: Soviet leader greets Woerner, accepts an invitation to a future alliance meeting.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, accepting an invitation to a future NATO meeting, called Saturday for a joint East-West declaration that would proclaim the end of the Cold War and move beyond it to establish a partnership ensuring European security.

Gorbachev told NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner that decisions at the recent summit meetings of NATO in London and the Warsaw Pact in Moscow to reduce their armaments and reorient their defense strategies had confirmed that the long period of East-West hostility was over and that moves should be made quickly to build this into a new relationship.

Greeting Woerner, the first secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to visit Moscow, Gorbachev described the proposed declaration, which would begin with a nonaggression clause and proceed through levels of political, military, economic and environmental cooperation, as a potential “landmark in world politics.”

Woerner said later that he told Gorbachev and Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, that “our alliance does not look upon you as an adversary but as a future partner” and added that he had reached agreement on a series of exchange visits and talks between the top military commanders of the two alliances.

“There is a clear coincidence in the approach set out by the North Atlantic alliance in London and the views of the Soviet leadership,” Woerner said. “The hand of friendship has been extended on both sides, and there is agreement on building a new relationship.”

He said that Gorbachev had accepted the NATO invitation--perhaps to address a meeting of foreign ministers, perhaps for a summit meeting--to come to its headquarters in Brussels, in what would be a landmark in the growing East-West dialogue.

Woerner’s visit itself was a landmark, and Gennady I. Gerasimov, the chief spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry, described it as “history-making.”

Woerner was careful, however, not to intrude on the talks, opening today, between Gorbachev and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl on German reunification and the membership of a unified Germany in NATO.

Although he argued strongly at a news conference, as he had in Brussels, that it was in the Soviet Union’s interests for Germany to be a NATO member and firmly anchored in that alliance, Woerner said he had not discussed the question with either Gorbachev or Shevardnadze.

“Since my Soviet partners did not raise the issue, I did not raise it,” Woerner said. “But I would not draw any conclusion from that at this precise moment. The one that I have drawn is that of confidence that we will find a solution.”

Woerner later admitted he had discussed the future levels of allied and Soviet forces in Germany, largely in the context of a proposal agreement cutting back troop levels and matching Soviet cutbacks.

Shevardnadze, giving a luncheon in Woerner’s honor, urged NATO to join with the Warsaw Pact in moving toward the two blocs’ dissolution.

“If the Cold War period is over, if we are unanimous that the future Europe should be based not on the balance of forces, but on the balance of interests of all states,” he said, “we should recognize that the old structures on which the division of Europe was built should gradually give way to new, all-European structures.

“Much will depend on the transformation of the NATO and Warsaw Pact military structures into political ones, based on mutual understanding and confidence between them.”

Both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze praised the NATO declaration in London earlier this month as a major step toward this new relationship. In that statement, the leaders of the NATO countries agreed to extend cooperation to the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies by further reducing and reshaping their forces and establishing military and diplomatic ties.

“We regard this approach as realistic and constructive,” Shevardnadze said. “The London resolutions follow the right direction and pave the way to a safe future for the whole of the European Continent.”