Outlying Missiles Off Alert, Russians Say : Military: More than 1,300 warheads are placed in a reduced state of readiness, U.S. officials are told.

Russian and other officials from the old Soviet Union said in a private meeting here that virtually all long-range nuclear missiles in the peripheral republics outside Russia are now off alert status, according to U.S. officials and others briefed on the meeting this week.

Instead of being capable of launching within minutes, the missiles--equipped with more than 1,300 warheads--now require hours or even days to prepare for firing, officials said.

This drastically reduces the danger of an accidental or unauthorized launch.

The report means that, among the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, only Russia and Belarus--and even that former Soviet republic’s missiles are in a reduced state of readiness--have strategic missiles that can be launched quickly.

More importantly, it indicates that central authorities in Moscow have tight control over all strategic weapons that could hit the United States, officials said.

“In general, the effort of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus has been pretty impressive,” said one official.

“The authorities have moved expeditiously and responsibly to do the job” of making both their strategic and tactical (short-range) nuclear weapons secure.

Both Ukraine and Belarus have pledged to move all of their tactical weapons back to Russia by July 1. “We don’t know this is actually happening, but we can observe lots of activity there consistent with a real commitment to do this by mid-year,” another official said.

When such movement is completed, all tactical weapons of the old Soviet Union will have been moved back into Russia. Such weapons have already been removed from the other former Soviet republics.

The number of weapons in the non-Russian republics was always a relatively small part of the total nuclear arsenal of more than 10,000 warheads that remain on Russian land-based and submarine-based missiles. But the danger of accidental or unauthorized launching of such missiles from the peripheral regions was viewed as somewhat higher than from Russia itself.

A Moscow delegation, led by Sergei V. Kortunov, chief of the arms control department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, visited the Brookings Institution here this week. In a meeting, they said all 104 of the biggest former Soviet missiles, the 10-warhead SS-18s, had been taken off alert in Kazakhstan.

They account for 1,04O warheads, each with the power of at least 500 kilotons, equal to 500,000 tons of TNT.