U.S. to Tie Soviet Aid to Arms Cuts : Diplomacy: Defense Secretary Cheney says concrete steps on a reduction in nuclear weapons are needed before significant American funds can be committed.

Applying new pressure on the Soviet Union to accelerate economic and military reform, Administration officials said Wednesday that future U.S. financial and technical aid to the Soviet Union will depend on Soviet moves to match the nuclear arms reductions announced last week by President Bush.

While the initial reaction by Soviet leaders to Bush’s initiatives has been positive, Administration officials are awaiting concrete steps by the Soviets to reduce their nuclear arsenal before committing significant additional American funds to aid programs, officials said.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney made the latest linkage in an interview Wednesday.

Cheney, the key architect of the Bush initiatives, called reciprocal moves to reduce the Soviet stockpile of dangerous nuclear weapons “an important prerequisite” for continued large-scale U.S. aid in helping the Russian Federation and the other Soviet republics emerge from their economic morass.

“Nobody in the West is going to be very eager to provide a lot of economic assistance to a nation that still has 27,000 warheads, a lot of them pointed at us,” Cheney said.

He also said that the United States is not interested in engaging in protracted negotiations on arms reductions but that it expects Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to undertake sizable nuclear weapons reductions without delay.

“There’s not a lot to negotiate on,” Cheney said.

In his Friday night speech outlining the arms-reduction proposals, Bush said that several of the U.S. moves could be reversed, if not matched by equivalent Soviet concessions. He skirted the question of linking future Western aid to arms reduction by saying: “As we implement these initiatives we will closely watch how the new Soviet leadership responds. We expect our bold initiatives to be met with equally bold steps on the Soviet side.

“If this happens, further cooperation is inevitable. If it does not, then an historical opportunity will have been lost,” Bush said.

Cheney went much further Wednesday. Cutting the Soviet nuclear stockpile is “clearly the kind of thing they must do, if they want to free up resources to promote economic reform,” he said. “Addressing these kinds of strategic nuclear questions, I think, is an important prerequisite--although it hasn’t been laid out this way as part of policy--before the American people are going to have confidence that we can engage the Soviets on things like economic reform.”

In the past, Secretary of State James A. Baker III has said that the United States expects the Soviet Union to significantly reduce its military establishment before the West contributes large sums to support economic renewal. After the August coup attempt, White House aides suggested privately that aid might be used as a lever to persuade Moscow to cut its nuclear stockpile and tighten controls over its weapons to assure that they do not fall into the hands of dissidents.

Soviet officials have said that they intend to reduce the overall size of their armed forces and have made general promises to convert part of the military-industrial complex to civilian production. They also have offered to discuss deep cuts in the two superpower nuclear arsenals and have called for a comprehensive ban on testing nuclear weapons.

Cheney welcomed these Soviet steps. But his remarks were the first time an Administration official has referred to specific changes in Soviet military policy that Washington wants to see adopted as the price of expanded U.S. aid.

He rejected a nuclear test ban, as have all previous U.S. administrations, saying that periodic tests ensure the safety and security of the nuclear stockpile. Gorbachev has repeatedly called for a ban on all nuclear testing.

A team of senior U.S. officials, led by Reginald Bartholomew, the State Department’s undersecretary for security assistance, will leave for Moscow at the end of the week to brief Soviet officials on the Bush plan and to hear how the Soviets intend to respond.

Cheney characterized the talks as “an exchange, not a negotiation,” in which the U.S. delegation will be seeking specific Soviet responses to the arms-reduction plan.

The team will discuss “those things we expect them to do unilaterally to undertake reciprocal actions,” Cheney said.

Gorbachev and Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin have responded favorably both in public and privately in telephone conversations with Bush, Cheney said. Gorbachev’s spokesman said Tuesday that some Soviet land-based missiles scheduled to be dismantled under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty would be deactivated at an accelerated pace, matching a U.S. move.

But neither Gorbachev nor any of his aides have addressed the broader question of eliminating land-based tactical nuclear weapons, as called for under the Bush plan. Cheney noted that the Soviet people “are more at risk from those systems than we are” and urged Moscow to take quick action to destroy them.

Cheney also explicitly raised an issue that Administration officials have voiced only privately--the question of whether Gorbachev retains enough authority after the failed August coup to order nuclear arms reductions on his own.

“As best we can tell, they still have centralized control over their (nuclear) systems,” Cheney said. Asked whether Gorbachev alone could decree the elimination of whole classes of weapons deployed not only in Russia but in several other Soviet republics, Cheney said bluntly: “Don’t know.”

“We know in the past that Gorbachev could have ordered this done. Under the old Soviet system, the general secretary of the Communist Party ran the show and had total authority,” Cheney said. “Today, we simply don’t know exactly who would make this kind of decision.”

Cheney said the United States could discontinue some of the initiatives, if the Soviet response is inadequate, but he made clear that there is a limit to Washington’s willingness to return to policies in place before Bush’s speech.

While many of the U.S. arms cuts will be unilateral, the President proposed new negotiations with the Soviets on two issues--eliminating multiple-warhead missiles and permitting new anti-ballistic missile systems on land and in space. Missile defenses, such as those envisioned by the Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, have been a point of bitter contention between Washington and Moscow since former President Ronald Reagan first proposed the idea in 1983.

The Soviets have long rejected U.S. attempts to amend or rescind the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bans most missile defenses.

“There are signs that there are people in positions of responsibility who are willing to entertain the notion of discussing defenses for the first time,” Cheney said. “I think there’s a growing awareness on the part of the Soviets of their vulnerability to ballistic missile attack from someplace besides the United States.”

Cheney added that SDI’s new focus on defending against accidental or limited launches of nuclear missiles “should go a long way towards reassuring them” that American missile defenses are not intended to shield the United States from a Soviet retaliation for an American first strike.

Cheney said the U.S. team being sent to Moscow probably will carry specific proposals on the environmentally safe destruction of nuclear warheads and the exchange of early warning data on missile launches.