Warsaw Pact, NATO Agree to Arms Treaty

NATO and the Warsaw Pact agreed in principle today to a treaty drastically slashing their Cold War arsenals of non-nuclear weapons, delegates said.

The 22 nations represented at the Conventional Forces in Europe talks then began cleaning up the 200-page text, which sets ceilings on the number of weapons each alliance can hold.

The treaty, the first covering conventional arms since World War II, is to be formally initialed in Vienna on Sunday and signed a day later in Paris at a 34-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Agreement on the treaty, far from certain as recently as a few weeks ago, clears the way to full participation at the Paris summit. The United States had said it would not attend unless the treaty was certain to be approved.

Under the treaty, described as the most far-reaching and complex arms accord ever negotiated, each alliance will be limited to 20,000 tanks, 30,000 armored cars, 20,000 artillery pieces, 6,800 combat aircraft and 2,000 attack helicopters.

The ceilings will be divided between four zones in the area under negotiation, a vast tract of 2.3 million square miles stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals.

Under the overall ceilings, each country will have its own national limit. To reach these ceilings, nations will have to scrap or convert to peaceful use a quarter of a million arms, in some cases up to half of current stocks.

Moscow will have to get rid of 19,000 tanks to meet the new limit.

Talks will start immediately after the summit on a second-stage agreement that will set ceilings on the number of troops deployed by both sides.