U.S., Soviets Near Accord on Conventional Arms Pact

Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze said Thursday that they are near agreement on a treaty limiting conventional arms in Europe, apparently clearing the way for a summit meeting of European and North American leaders in Paris in November.

“We have made real headway,” Shevardnadze said after a two-hour meeting in Baker’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel suite.

Baker agreed, saying, “We made some good progress.”

Baker immediately took the emerging agreement to a caucus of foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Although the United States and the Soviet Union are clearly the most important players, the Conventional Forces in Europe negotiations involve all members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. All of the nations must ultimately approve an agreement before it can go into effect.

“We will now have to consult our allies,” Shevardnadze said. “But on a bilateral basis, we have made real headway.”

When the talks began several years ago, there were 23 nations represented--16 in NATO and seven in the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact membership dropped to six earlier this week when East Germany withdrew from the alliance in preparation for unifying with West Germany next Wednesday.

Negotiators in Vienna have already settled most of the key issues, such as the number of tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery pieces and other weapons that each bloc would be allowed to maintain. But there were three remaining obstacles--the percentage of the arms assigned to each alliance that any single country would be allowed to maintain; distribution of the weapons by geographic zones, and numbers and classes of aircraft that would be permitted.

A senior U.S. official said Baker and Shevardnadze settled “many, if not most” of the differences over distribution of weapons within each alliance. He declined to say how the compromise was reached.

At an earlier stage in the talks, the United States wanted no country to hold more than 30% of a bloc’s weapons while Moscow wanted a 40% limit. However, Baker said the final agreement would use neither figure.

With the Warsaw Pact nearing collapse, the argument may be moot, anyway. If present trends continue, the Soviet Union may be left as the only member of the alliance.

The senior official said substantial progress was also made on the largely technical zone issue.

That leaves aircraft as the sole matter in dispute. The two sides have been unable to agree on numbers, distribution or classification of land-based Soviet aircraft with a naval patrol mission. The United States wants to count the Soviet planes because they are based on land, but Moscow wants to exclude them because carrier-based American aircraft, which have similar missions, have been excluded.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union have said they will not attend a Conference on Security and Cooperation summit meeting, scheduled for November in Paris, unless a conventional arms pact is ready to be signed there.

A senior French diplomat said it would be a disaster if the conference, called to chart the post-Cold War structure of Europe, were postponed or canceled because of lingering disputes over technical conventional arms control issues.

“I don’t see world leaders running the risk of not holding this conference because some little nut or bolt is not in place,” the diplomat said.

The summit is expected to draw the presidents and prime ministers from the United States, Canada and all European nations except for isolationist Albania.