Baker Flies to London in Effort to Close Arms Deal With Russia

Secretary of State James A. Baker III headed for London late Thursday for hastily arranged talks with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev that are intended to nail down an agreement to slash nuclear arsenals in time for next week’s U.S.-Russia summit meeting in Washington.

The London meeting, scheduled for a site about halfway between Moscow and Washington, is a continuation of inconclusive talks between Baker and Kozyrev in Washington earlier this week.

When the two men parted Tuesday, they had agreed in principle to cut U.S. and Russian nuclear forces by almost 50%, but they still differed on which missiles should be destroyed and how quickly.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher delivered what he called a “here today, gone today” announcement because it came less than 10 hours before the secretary of state’s scheduled departure. He said that Baker and Kozyrev concluded after a Washington-Moscow telephone call Thursday morning that one more face-to-face meeting might wrap up the shortest arms control talks since the onset of the Cold War.

Both Washington and Moscow want to complete the agreement in time for President Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to sign during their first formal summit next Tuesday and Wednesday.

Without an arms control pact, the most important document expected to be approved at the summit will be a broadly worded “charter of principles” that Yeltsin deems important but that U.S. officials consider almost meaningless.

Talking to reporters Thursday in Moscow, Yeltsin said “agreement can be reached” in time for the summit. That was in sharp contrast to the Russian president’s mood Wednesday, when he accused the United States of advocating an arms treaty that would put Russia at a long-term disadvantage.

U.S. and Russian officials say the two governments support a cut of almost 50% in the long-range nuclear weapons ceilings set by the still unratified Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed last July by Bush and then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.