Help Soviets Financially, Jackson Urges : Politics: The civil rights leader would cut Pentagon spending by 33%, use funds to aid ailing U.S. cities and states as well as U.S.S.R.

As the Soviet Union disintegrates politically, the U.S. military budget should be sliced by a third to finance an outpouring of assistance to the former enemy, perennial presidential candidate and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said Tuesday.

Jackson hastened to add that the proceeds of a military cutback should also underwrite a package of aid to America’s financially troubled cities and states.

“You do not want people running around desperate and hungry with a nuclear arsenal,” Jackson told editors and reporters at the Los Angeles Times in suggesting the Soviet aid.

Jackson said he was seriously weighing a 1992 campaign for the presidency. “There are more reasons to run than not to run--but I have not made that decision,” he said, calling the presidency “an option, not an obsession.”

Jackson did not specify the level of aid he would favor for the Soviet Union, but the dimensions of his proposed defense cut would allow massive international and domestic infusions. The 1992 defense budget totals $290.8 billion, a 3.3% after-inflation decline from the previous year.

President Bush has sought in recent days to blunt renewed calls for aid to the Soviet Union, although he has extended $315 million in agricultural credits. Last month, at the annual summit meeting of the world’s industrial democracies, Bush blocked proposals for immediate and extensive Western aid to the Soviets.

Jackson argued that aid should be forwarded to the Soviets on a host of grounds--from humanitarian to pragmatic. Despite his argument that the money should be paid in part to stave off desperation in a well-armed nation, he flatly dismissed the Soviet Union as a future military concern.

“Now, with virtually no Soviet threat, we’re locked into a budget designed for a war that virtually can’t happen,” he said.

On the domestic front, Jackson proposed a wholesale buttressing of America’s economy, from spending more money on education to building low-income housing to helping military contractors convert into domestic manufacturing. Again, he did not propose a specific level of funding.

“We need perestroika ourselves,” he said, using the Russian word for restructuring.

Although the civil rights leader was clearly open to a Democratic presidential bid, neither of the nation’s political parties came in for praise from him. He said the time was ripe for a “third force” in national politics.

He would not say whether that force would evolve into an independent party or if it would be his vehicle for a third-party campaign for the presidency, although he did refer to former Illinois Rep. John B. Anderson’s independent presidential bid in 1980.

“Neither party is addressing in any meaningful way this growing body of economically anxious and frightened Americans,” Jackson said, noting that the Democratic Party has “resisted” his direction for the past decade.

“The Democrats must offer America a clear choice . . . but more and more the party leadership wants to embrace the same assumptions as Republicans, the same vision.”

Jackson derided President Bush, with whom he once had a more cordial relationship. He accused Bush of playing “hardball race politics, which is beneath the dignity of the country.”

He sternly criticized Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, black conservative Clarence Thomas, for failing to support the policy goals of civil rights leaders after personally benefiting from the civil rights movement.

“No one can say he’s the best we have to offer the Supreme Court,” he said. “He’s not even the best black we have to offer for the Supreme Court. He’s the best political choice (for Bush).”