Soviets Pledge ‘Dramatic Response’ to Bush Proposals : Disarmament: Gorbachev aide expects an initial reply in a week. A series of missions are planned.

Foreign Minister Boris D. Pankin promised Tuesday that the Soviet Union will eventually give “a dramatic response” to President Bush’s nuclear disarmament proposals after a series of technical meetings that will begin in the next 10 days.

A flurry of missions seemed in prospect as the State Department announced that it will send a mission to Moscow in the next few days and Pankin said that Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei A. Obukhov will meet in Washington Oct. 9 and 10 with Undersecretary of State Reginald Bartholomew.

At a press conference closing his 10-day visit to New York for the U.N. General Assembly meeting, Pankin said he is sure the Soviet reply will be positive and dramatic, since the Soviets see the Bush proposals “as another link in the chain of disarmament and arms-control negotiations, initiatives and agreements” that began with the proposals of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1986 to do away with all nuclear weapons by the end of the century.

Pankin also announced that the European Community and the Group of Seven industrialized nations will send a joint mission to Moscow on Oct. 14 to assess the Soviets’ economic needs and what can be done to help. The United States, a G-7 member, will take part in this mission.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler announced that the first nuclear mission will be a high-ranking interagency U.S. delegation that will go to Moscow to answer Soviet questions about the impact of Bush’s nuclear initiative. She said the Soviet Foreign Ministry on Monday handed the U.S. Embassy in Moscow a list of questions on specific aspects of the President’s proposal that the delegation will attempt to answer.

Pankin said the idea for U.S.-Soviet meetings on the Bush nuclear proposals came out of talks between the Soviet ambassador in Washington and Brent Scowcroft, the White House national security adviser. He said the Obukhov-Bartholomew meeting will be followed by other sessions in Europe. The Soviet Union, he said, intends to propose a ban on nuclear testing and make proposals designed to do away with the proliferation of nuclear weapons globally.

In Moscow, Andrei S. Grachev, Gorbachev’s press secretary, said the Soviet Union expects to have an initial reply to the U.S. measures ready in a week and a fuller response, including unilateral reductions of its own and counterproposals for new negotiations, after talks with Washington. He said Gorbachev fully intends to match and, indeed, to better the U.S. move. He added that Moscow had already begun to take off alert status those intercontinental ballistic missiles and other strategic weapons to be eliminated under the arms-reduction treaty recently signed with the United States.

As for the idea of an economic mission to Moscow, Pankin said it came out of his talks in New York with foreign ministers of West European and other industrialized nations.

In Washington, President Bush made $585 million in agricultural credit guarantees immediately available to the Soviet Union so it will be of assistance “during the hard winter facing the Soviet people.” The Administration also said it will guarantee 100% of the principal on the loans to make them more attractive to bankers, who have been reluctant to extend financing to the cash-strapped Soviet Union.

Times staff writers Norman Kempster in Washington and Michael Parks in Moscow contributed to this story.