U.S. ‘Very Satisfied’ by Commonwealth Pact Despite Unsettled Details : Reaction: Baker had called for a single nuclear arms command, but that remains to be worked out.

The Bush Administration seemed relieved Saturday that 11 republics of the former Soviet Union were able to hammer together a new commonwealth agreement even though some details--including the way a crucial joint military command will work--were left hanging.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan contacted Secretary of State James A. Baker III by radiotelephone as Baker was flying home to Washington after talks in Brussels to describe the agreement that was signed in the Kazakh capital of Alma-Ata.

“We were very satisfied,” said a senior Administration official.

The official said that Baker telephoned President Bush from the aircraft to relay the contents of Nazarbayev’s report. The secretary of state and the President spoke again after Baker’s plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.

Baker was on his way home from a visit to five member states of the new commonwealth--Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine--and from talks, mostly about the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Brussels with NATO and European Community representatives.

At every stop on his visit to the five former Soviet republics, Baker called for creation of a single military command to control the estimated 27,000 nuclear weapons that remain in the Soviet arsenal. And at each stop, he was assured that such a plan would be adopted.

However, the commonwealth leaders were unable to work out all the details of that plan and agreed to meet again Dec. 30 in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, to continue the talks.

Nevertheless, the senior Administration official said he does not anticipate any major glitches.

One source of continuing controversy pits Kazakhstan, a republic where a small number of Soviet nuclear weapons are based, against the other three republics with nuclear weapons--Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Russia, already home to by far the largest share of nuclear weapons, plans to continue as a nuclear power, while all of the weapons in the other three republics are destroyed. That suits Ukraine and Belarus fine, but Kazakhstan continues to balk.

Nazarbayev’s press spokesman, Seit-Cazy Matayev, told reporters Saturday in Alma-Ata, “No one republic, no matter how big, has the right to be the only republic to have a nuclear force.”

When Baker was in Alma-Ata on Tuesday, Matayev told reporters traveling with the secretary of state that it would be “unacceptable” for all weapons in Kazakhstan to be destroyed while arms remained in Russia.

Baker told a press conference Thursday in Brussels that despite the spokesman’s comments, Nazarbayev had agreed that Kazakhstan would sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear power, apparently indicating the removal of all nuclear arms now on Kazakh territory.

Talking to reporters after Baker’s conversation Saturday with Nazarbayev, the senior official said the Kazakh president reiterated his pledge to sign the non-proliferation pact as a non-nuclear state once Kazakhstan wins full international recognition as an independent state and is admitted to the United Nations.

However, if all Soviet nuclear weapons are placed under a joint military command, a step all the republics say they plan to take, the treaty would not require the destruction or removal of all weapons in Kazakhstan. Weapons under the joint command would be analogous to U.S.-controlled weapons stationed in Germany and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries.

Despite an Administration view that the signing of the commonwealth agreement will head off immediate disasters, officials clearly have doubts about the prospects of the economically strapped former superpower.

“Once they are sovereign independent nations, they will have a freer hand, but I do not see them as having any greater appreciation or knowledge of what it is going to take” to make a success of the beleaguered economy, a senior official said Friday.

“The commonwealth agreement permits them all to go their own way,” the official said. “The commonwealth will be just an agreement between sovereign independent states. It’s not a union in any respect. . . . “