U.S. Expects Quick Action in Vienna Arms Talks

A senior U.S. official expressed optimism Wednesday that negotiations on a treaty to reduce conventional forces in Europe will move speedily toward completion this fall as a result of the surprisingly quick Soviet-German agreement on the future size of an all-German army.

Reginald Bartholemew, undersecretary of state for international security affairs, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that it is the Bush Administration’s “strong hope” that the Conventional Forces in Europe negotiations in Vienna will be completed in time for a Europe-wide summit conference Nov. 19.

The summit would formally recognize the new military and political balance on the Continent.

The CFE negotiations have slowed markedly in recent months as a result of Soviet security concerns arising from the headlong pace of German unification. The delays have threatened to put off conclusion both of the CFE treaty and of the 35-nation summit, which is conditioned on a completed treaty.

Bartholemew earlier told reporters that West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had removed the “last major political obstacle” to a conventional forces agreement when he set a ceiling of 370,000 soldiers for the army of a united Germany.

He cautioned, however, that some of the remaining technical problems could become major political issues if mishandled in the final months of negotiations. In particular, he cited the sensitive questions of verification, inspection and other terms for policing the treaty.

Other outstanding issues deal with aircraft--how many and what kind to include in the treaty’s ceilings on armaments--and conditions for destruction of weapons that are to be eliminated or for their conversion to peaceful uses, he said.

Bartholemew had no additional information on the points agreed to by Kohl and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev a day earlier, such as precisely how the manpower ceiling of a unified Germany would be formally codified or how North Atlantic Treaty Organization nuclear arms would be prohibited from the current territory of East Germany, as Kohl and Gorbachev indicated they would be.

He maintained that these provisions were “generally within the overall terms” for a German settlement agreed to by NATO nations at the London summit earlier this month. But he did nothing to dispel the widespread belief that Washington and other NATO capitals were brought up short by Kohl’s commitments as well as Gorbachev’s agreement to a unified Germany during their meeting this week.

Besides manpower, limits on five categories of weapons are being negotiated between the two military blocs in the conventional forces talks. They include tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.