Soviet Arsenal Is Under ‘Collective’ Control, U.S. Says : Nuclear arms: Baker finds new arrangement acceptable, but he will press for specific safeguards.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III indicated Friday that the nuclear arsenal of the old Soviet Union is no longer under the command of a single, central authority and has now passed to the “collective” control of independent republics.

Baker said the United States regards such a realignment as acceptable, and President Bush, after speaking by telephone to both Boris N. Yeltsin and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, said he had been assured that Soviet nuclear weapons remain safe.

But Baker, in a White House briefing, stressed that he intends to press for specific, detailed assurances of security and responsibility when he travels to Moscow and the capitals of four other republics on a weeklong trip beginning tonight.

The secretary of state said the top priority of the Administration will be to address these “remarkable transformations” from “the standpoint of the dangers presented . . . in a country that had 30,000 nuclear weapons.”

At the same time, however, senior Administration officials said there had been indications of an emerging bidding war among unidentified “third parties” for sensitive Soviet military hardware, technology and expertise.

These sources, who insisted on anonymity, cautioned that the nature of contacts remained ambiguous but said there was increasing concern that approaches to individuals in one or more Soviet republics could be first steps in a bid by non-nuclear nations to gain access to Soviet capabilities.

The emerging picture of realignment and jockeying for control of nuclear weapons underscores the phenomenal change taking place in this phase of the Soviet upheaval.

Baker also emphasized the need for the United States to provide humanitarian help to cushion a “second Russian revolution,” and the Pentagon announced that U.S. Air Force cargo planes will deliver relief supplies to cities in Russia, Belarus and Armenia a week before Christmas.

The airlift of cots, blankets and other Pentagon surplus represents the first ever U.S. humanitarian mission to Moscow and Minsk. U.S. military aircraft delivered supplies to Armenia in 1988 after a catastrophic earthquake there.

In Brussels, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who had earlier resisted a congressional directive to use Pentagon funds for the effort, described the effort as “the best and perhaps the only opportunity” for the United States to help the emerging republics escape from totalitarianism.

Bush’s half-hour conversation with Soviet President Gorbachev was the first between the two once-close partners since Russian President Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus last Sunday declared the Soviet Union dead, described Gorbachev as irrelevant and proclaimed the formation of a new commonwealth.

With his silence, aides insisted, Bush had simply sought to avoid any sign of interference in the power struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev. The President vowed again Friday to stay out of internal Soviet affairs, and his chief spokesman said he had decided to talk to Gorbachev only after being telephoned by Yeltsin for the second time in six days.

The call from Bush, which reached Moscow after midnight, appeared to come too late to offer much comfort now that the Yeltsin-backed commonwealth has won widespread support. Departing from an earlier caution, U.S. officials acknowledged they now have no doubt that the Soviet leader will step down.

“Gorby’s a goner,” one Administration official said.

On the question of nuclear weapons, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said that Bush was assured by both Gorbachev and Yeltsin that the “command and control system remained secure.”

In neither of the conversations, however, did the leaders discuss in detail how arrangements for control of the Soviet nuclear weapons may have changed as central authority in Moscow has collapsed, according to knowledgeable U.S. officials.

And while Baker stopped short of explicit acknowledgment that a change had occurred, Administration officials said later there was little doubt that the devolution of power to the republics had left the Soviet arsenal under de facto joint control.

“It’s collective,” a ranking Administration official confirmed of the new command and control arrangements. He said the United States believes that the leaders of the four nuclear-equipped republics--Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan--had essentially agreed to share authority, with each guaranteed veto power over use of the estimated 27,000 weapons on their soil.

The Administration has insisted since the early stages of the old union’s disintegration that control of the arsenal remained unaffected. But Baker on Friday departed from that formulation to state carefully that the United States had not seen “any changes in command and control that alarm us.” And he went out of his way to declare that “collective participation . . . would not alarm” the United States.

The Administration has previously insisted that Soviet weapons should remain under “unified command,” a phrase intended to preclude such shared authority. Only hours earlier, Cheney and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense ministers meeting in Brussels issued a communique emphasizing the importance of maintaining control “under a single authority.”

But while Baker stressed that leaders of the nuclear-equipped republics were “to some extent . . . still working out” the command and control arrangements, other U.S. officials said the unmistakable desire of the republic leaders to adopt joint control gave the Administration little choice but to accede.

Baker leaves Washington tonight on a grueling trip in which he is to visit Moscow, the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, the Belarussian capital of Minsk, the Kazakhstani capital of Alma Ata and the Kyrgyzstani capital of Bishkek.

That it was Baker rather than Bush who appeared at a White House news conference on the subject marked the continuation of the President’s unusual low profile on what amounts to a foreign crisis.

Some officials have speculated that the strategy reflects sensitivity to criticism about Bush’s normal preference for foreign affairs. As if to mock the new approach, House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri sent a letter to Bush urging that he deliver a nationally televised address on the subject.

But Fitzwater, the White House spokesman, said Bush was simply “trying to stay away from the Gorbachev versus Yeltsin struggle until they get things worked out.”

As he prepared to depart on his trip, Baker also offered new details about U.S. plans to host a conference next month to help coordinate international efforts to respond to changes in the Soviet Union.

He said the purpose of the meeting, expected to open around Jan. 15, would be “not to conduct a pledging session” but “to call to arms, if you will, the international community to address what is a very, very substantial transformation that has the capability of affecting the rest of the world.”

Baker nevertheless left little doubt that the U.S. approach will follow a model established in preparation for the Persian Gulf War in which the United States used diplomatic leverage to persuade other countries to foot the bill.