NATO to Slash A-Weapons 80% : Europe: Ministers approve the basics of a new strategy based on smaller, more mobile forces. A French-German accord to create an armed force overshadows the talks.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreed here Thursday on a dramatic reduction in its nuclear armory in Europe. NATO defense ministers decided to eliminate fully 80% of the alliance’s 3,500 nuclear weapons--leaving only 700 air-delivered atomic bombs at European air bases.

The ministers also approved the outlines of the sweeping new strategy for NATO in the aftermath of the Cold War, based on smaller, more mobile forces able to respond to contingencies inside and outside Europe.

But the NATO nuclear policy discussions were overshadowed by the surprise announcement Wednesday that France and Germany plan to create a military force independent of NATO itself.

U.S. and British officials said Thursday that they found the French-German proposal unsettling.

“The French want to be heavily involved in European defense, and no doubt the Germans want to help them along,” said a senior British official. “But we have quite serious doubts about whether this is the way to do it. We just don’t understand the logic behind the formulation of this unit at this time.”

A senior American defense official said that Washington has numerous questions about the new force: “Its mission, its area of operations, its relationship to NATO. There’s a lot of questions that need to be addressed.”

Overall, the meeting in this Sicilian resort presented a picture of an alliance in turmoil over its role in the wake of the collapse of its longtime adversary, the Soviet Union. Western European nations are seeking a larger role in defense of their own security posture after 45 years of American dominance in the alliance military structure.

The current flap over the proposal for a French-German force is expected to be only one of many such disputes, as Europe struggles to define its new security needs, senior NATO officials said.

Thursday’s decision to scrap most nuclear weapons based in Europe had been anticipated after President Bush’s Sept. 27 announcement that the United States would withdraw and destroy all 2,100 of its ground-based nuclear arms in Europe. The NATO ministers, meeting at an elegant seaside hotel, went further--slashing the inventory of the 1,400 air-delivered gravity bombs in half.

The withdrawal of the atomic weapons will take two to three years, officials said. Disposing of them will take longer because of the limited capacity of the United States for dismantling the arms.

But the NATO ministers deferred a decision on whether to comply with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s proposal to move the atomic bombs away from the aircraft that presumably would deliver them and to put them in central storage sites.

U.S. officials cited the cost of moving the weapons as a reason for not accepting Gorbachev’s plan, as well as additional operational problems.

For instance, new nuclear weapons bunkers have been under construction at several NATO European bases to enhance the security of these dangerous weapons. According to knowledgeable defense analysts, the nuclear air-delivered bombs are deployed at airfields in Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Greece and Turkey.

“The whole trend has been to keep the weapons as close to the delivery systems as possible,” one senior allied defense official said Thursday. Separate storage facilities for nuclear weapons, he added, would create “new priority targets. People don’t want to dismiss these proposals out of hand--but there are real problems,” he said.

At the same time Thursday, German NATO officials here sought to allay allied fears about the plan to create a new military force--an armored corps made up of a French tank division and a German mechanized division.

German officials seemed taken aback Thursday by the stories that were widely played around the world depicting the Bonn government as entering into a new military alliance with Paris.

The Germans stress that other NATO countries would be invited to contribute troops to this new proposed force.

German Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg said Thursday that the proposed force is designed to strengthen NATO--not replace it. “There is no question of NATO’s central role,” he said. “We want to avoid competition. This corps is not to be understood as the building of a European force outside the alliance.”

Stoltenberg described the new force as an expansion of the existing French-German brigade of about 4,200 troops, rather than a wholly new military unit.

Two divisions with headquarters and support troops would number at least 35,000.

The German defense minister said no German troops now assigned to NATO would be withdrawn from the alliance.

Stoltenberg and other German NATO officials remained vague on precisely what role the new French-German force would play--either inside NATO’s boundaries or as an outside force that could be deployed in conflict areas such as the Persian Gulf or Yugoslavia.

Stoltenberg acknowledged that discussions with the French on the new force were still in the preliminary stage and that the group’s mission was “open for discussion; it’s not defined in detail.”

France is a member of the 16-nation NATO alliance but does not contribute forces to its military structure. France is not, therefore, represented at meetings of NATO defense ministers such as the one Thursday.

The two-day meeting, which will conclude today, is attempting to revise basic alliance strategic doctrine for presentation to the NATO summit meeting next month in Rome.