Gorbachev Announces Sharp Cuts in Short-Range A-Arms : Disarmament: Responding to Bush’s plan, he says warheads will be scrapped. He also seeks talks soon on slashing U.S. and Soviet strategic arsenals by half.

After a full week’s deliberation, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev responded dramatically to President Bush on Saturday night by announcing sweeping cuts in Soviet tactical nuclear arms and seeking urgent talks to slash already dwindling superpower strategic arsenals by half.

In his Sept. 27 initiative, Bush urged the Soviets to destroy their short-range nuclear weapons. In response, Gorbachev said that all Soviet nuclear artillery shells, mines and warheads for tactical, or short-range, missiles will be scrapped.

Reacting to Bush’s arms-reduction proposals and in some instances going beyond them, Gorbachev said the Soviet Union will exceed the cuts mandated by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that he and Bush signed July 31, which sets a limit of 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads for the Soviet Union, and eventually reduce its total even further, to 5,000.

“We, of course, would welcome a similar move by the U.S.A.,” Gorbachev said in a televised address that greatly upped the ante in the suddenly accelerating movement by both superpowers away from decades of nuclear standoff.

Responding to the unilateral measures taken a week earlier by Bush to reduce U.S.-Soviet military confrontation, already at its lowest level in history, Gorbachev said Soviet heavy bombers, like their American counterparts, will be taken off full-time alert status and their nuclear bombs put in storage.

In addition, a total of 503 Soviet ICBMs are being taken off “day-to-day alert,” including 134 missiles with multiple, individually targetable warheads, Gorbachev said.

The Kremlin will also immediately begin a one-year moratorium on nuclear tests, Gorbachev said, and he called on the United States and the world’s other nuclear powers to follow suit as a step toward the eventual cessation of all testing.

In Washington, Bush called Gorbachev’s announcement on Soviet weapons reductions “good news for the whole world,” and said U.S. officials were sitting down to explore the details with their Soviet counterparts.

“It’s very positive,” Bush said after talking to Gorbachev by telephone. “They’ve come a long way.”

In certain respects, Gorbachev’s proposals seemed to ignore Bush’s program, but sometimes for understandable reasons. For example, the American President called for the reduction and eventual elimination of all U.S. and Soviet ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads. Those weapons, such as the SS-18 and SS-19, are the workhorse of the Soviet strategic arsenal.

Bush also said he was ordering the destruction of all U.S. ground-launched tactical nuclear missiles and the removal of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from submarines and surface warships.

“Obviously, the question also arises of a new Soviet-American summit,” Gorbachev said, recognizing the differences in the superpowers’ disarmament programs. He said that in his telephone conversation with Bush, he had suggested a summit date, but he did not disclose it.

Gorbachev’s power has been severely truncated by the political changes that resulted from the failed right-wing attempt to take power in August, and it is an open question what sort of control he now exerts over the Soviet governmental apparatus and military.

Tacitly acknowledging his new, diminished status, Gorbachev made a point of saying that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and the leaders of the other Soviet republics share his views on disarmament. He also noted that all strategic nuclear weapons and the Soviet strategic defense network have now been put under a “single operational command,” a move that should help to calm fears of a possible dispersal of the Soviet Union’s immense nuclear potential among the country’s individual republics.

In addition to announcing destruction of all the Soviet Union’s ground-based tactical nuclear arms, Gorbachev said that nuclear warheads on antiaircraft missiles will be removed from active military units and stored on bases and that an unspecified number of them will be destroyed.

In what appeared to be the Soviet response to Bush’s decision to take weapons such as the Tomahawk nuclear-tipped cruise missile off U.S. submarines and surface warships, Gorbachev said that all tactical nuclear arms will be brought ashore from the Soviet navy’s surface warships and multipurpose submarines.

Those weapons, along with the nuclear bombs and other weapons now carried by ground-based naval aviation, will be put in storage and a part of them eliminated, he said.

In addition, three Soviet atomic-powered submarines capable of launching 44 ballistic missiles have already been decommissioned, and the Kremlin will take another three subs, equipped with 48 missile tubes, out of service, Gorbachev said.

‘In this fashion, on the basis of reciprocity, radical measures are being taken by the Soviet Union and the United States of America leading to the liquidation of tactical nuclear arms,” Gorbachev said. “The U.S.S.R. calls upon other nuclear powers to join these far-reaching Soviet-American steps. . . .”

In other moves intended to make the superpower military relationship even more stable, Gorbachev said that work would cease on modifications to short-range nuclear missiles to allow them to be carried by Soviet bombers and that a program to develop a small-size Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile will be halted.

He said there would be no increase in the number of rail-based mobile launchers for Soviet ICBMs or the number of long-range, multiple-warhead missiles they could launch. Moreover, all rail-launched ICBMs will be returned to their bases, Gorbachev said.

Such readily mobile and concealable missiles have long worried U.S. strategic planners, who call them a destabilizing factor in the superpower strategic relationship.

Gorbachev said the START treaty he signed two months ago in a Kremlin ceremony with Bush will be submitted for ratification to the Soviet legislature, the Supreme Soviet, when it convenes Oct. 21, and that a new round of arms reduction efforts should follow rapidly.

“After the ratification of the START treaty, we invite the United States to immediately enter intensive talks on the further radical reduction of strategic attack weapons, approximately by half,” Gorbachev said.

He said the Soviet Union is also ready to discuss U.S. proposals about a non-nuclear missile-defense system, and in what sounded like a groundbreaking proposition for a joint sort of “Star Wars” program, Gorbachev invited the Americans to consider creating a shared and partially space-based network to warn in advance of a missile strike.

In other proposals that could have far-reaching consequences, Gorbachev said his country is ready to conclude an agreement with the United States on the “controlled cessation” of all fissionable materials used for weapons production and for consultations on safe and ecologically sound ways to move and store warheads.

Gorbachev also called on the United States and other nuclear powers to sign a common pledge that they would not be the first to use the terribly destructive weapons in their arsenals.

He said the ranks of the Soviet armed forces would be cut by 700,000 people, but he may have included reductions already announced as part of the conventional forces cuts in Europe. Last week, Marshal Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, the defense minister, said he plans to cut back the Soviet armed forces from 4.2 million to 3 million men.

Although to many he now seems overshadowed by Yeltsin, Gorbachev took a large part of the credit for the back-to-back superpower moves toward disarmament, calling Bush’s speech proof that the “new thinking” policies espoused by his leadership since 1985 had borne fruit.

Earlier Saturday, a U.S. delegation led by the undersecretary of state for security assistance, science and technology, Reginald Bartholomew, arrived in Moscow to explain Bush’s arms reduction initiatives and was received by top Soviet Foreign Ministry officials.