Remaining Issues Stall Moscow Summit, Baker Reports : Diplomacy: Failure to settle disputes on strategic arms reduction holds up the date for Bush and Gorbachev.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander A. Bessmertnykh failed Thursday to settle three nagging disputes over arms control that are blocking an early summit meeting in Moscow.

With Bessmertnykh at his side in the garden of the U.S. ambassador’s residence, Baker said that, despite Thursday’s meeting, the United States and the Soviet Union are not much closer to setting the date for President Bush’s long-awaited visit to Moscow after the meeting than they had been before it began.

“I think we are right where we were when we last met with respect to the question of a summit,” Baker said. “That is, both presidents would like to . . . have a summit in Moscow at the earliest possible opportunity, but they would like to do so at a time when they could conclude the strategic arms (reduction) treaty.”

Baker said the same three disputes that have been blocking agreement for months continue to bedevil efforts to complete a treaty to reduce by more than one-third the long-range nuclear arsenals of the two nations.

He said that a recent exchange of letters between Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev narrowed the gap between the two sides in the long-running strategic nuclear arms negotiations but did not settle any of the outstanding issues.

Bessmertnykh was somewhat more optimistic. He said: “We have made significant progress on START issues. We think we can close all the outstanding issues in the coming weeks.”

The meeting, which lasted just under two hours, was the second one between Baker and Bessmertnykh in less than two weeks. They were in Berlin to attend a meeting of European and North American foreign ministers.

Although the most significant matters--such as the total number of nuclear warheads each side will be allowed to retain--were settled more than a year ago, negotiators must resolve the final questions before the complex, 400-page treaty can be signed by Bush and Gorbachev.

Baker said that Undersecretary of State Reginald Bartholomew will go to Geneva next week to provide a high-level push to the negotiations.

Bush and Gorbachev have already abandoned earlier plans to hold their summit meeting before the end of this month. Although Baker said he would not predict when the meeting might take place, the failure to resolve the remaining arms control disputes raises new doubts about the possibility of a summit next month. And because both presidents usually vacation in August, the meeting could be pushed back until September.

Baker said that he and Bessmertnykh also discussed the Middle East, where both countries are engaged in a so-far fruitless effort to bring Israel and its Arab neighbors to the negotiating table, and Central America, long a hotbed of superpower rivalry.

The remaining arms control issues all revolve around U.S. concerns that Moscow may try to circumvent the treaty’s limitations.

For instance, both sides have agreed on strict limits on production of new types of missiles while permitting the “modernization” of existing stockpiles.

Washington wants to draw the definition tight enough to prevent the Soviet Union from introducing a new heavy missile in the guise of modernizing its arsenal of monster SS-18 missiles. Negotiators already have agreed that the United States, which has never deployed missiles as powerful as the SS-18, would be banned from doing so in the future while the Soviets would be prohibited from developing new missiles in this class.

The second dispute goes by the mind-numbing label “downloading.” The Soviets want to meet the treaty’s overall limits on warheads by removing some of the nuclear explosives from multi-warhead missiles.

The effect would be to permit Moscow to comply with the limit on warheads while retaining more missiles than they could if they were required to scrap enough missiles to meet the limitations.

The third dispute is over U.S. efforts to prohibit coding of telemetry data from missile test firings.