U.S. Concerned About Shift of Tanks to Siberia

Only days before the scheduled signing of a sweeping European arms control treaty, U.S. officials expressed concern Thursday about the shift of thousands of Soviet tanks from Eastern Europe to Siberian territory not covered by the new pact.

The Soviet tanks and other armored vehicles moved east of the Ural Mountains cannot be excluded in calculating arms cutbacks required by the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, a high U.S. official said.

While Soviet negotiators have given assurances that some of the the weapons and equipment already have been destroyed and most of the rest will be scrapped later, U.S. officials said a team of American specialists has been sent to Moscow to get more precise information.

“This is a footnote, not the focus,” one Bush Administration official said, noting that the Soviet Union has been pulling back its forces from Europe for nearly two years with U.S. encouragement. “But we want to get a handle on it.”

Many of the tanks have been left in unprotected outdoor depots, exposed to the weather, according to Administration officials. U.S. satellite cameras also can detect stockpiles of Soviet arms that exceed the new ceilings.

At any rate, U.S. officials added, the tanks issue will not interfere with the planned signing of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty in Paris on Monday by President Bush, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and heads of 20 other North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Warsaw Pact nations.

The treaty, negotiated in a remarkably short 20-month period, is aimed at reducing Cold War tensions between East and West by bringing the former antagonists to military parity in a huge area stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals.

Even before agreement was reached, the Soviet Union was making major troop reductions in Eastern Europe as it relaxed its political grip on Warsaw Pact members such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland.

The treaty would make many of those arms reductions legally binding and give assurances to Moscow that the West would not build up its forces beyond the treaty levels.

Under the terms of the treaty, each side would be able to keep 20,000 battle tanks, 30,000 other armored vehicles, 20,000 artillery pieces, 6,800 combat planes and 2,000 attack helicopters.

U.S. officials said the agreement is a victory for the Administration, since cutbacks in tanks and other heavy weapons will be far greater for the East than for NATO.

On Sunday, the day before the arms reduction agreement is to be signed, both sides will exchange information about the size of their non-nuclear forces in Europe. They will have 40 months to destroy weapons that exceed the ceilings set in the treaty.