U.S. Arms Offer Seen Paving Way for Summit

The Bush Administration is working on a new strategic arms proposal that could help pave the way for the first summit meeting between President Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev later this year, officials said Friday.

The proposal, which Bush may announce later this month, will be aimed at closing the gaps on several issues in the four-year-old talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union on long-range nuclear weapons, the officials said.

Other Administration officials said they expect to receive a formal response from Gorbachev soon to several U.S. proposals offered earlier this year on ways to improve the verification of a proposed strategic arms agreement.

Picking Up the Pace

Both developments suggested that Bush, after moving slowly on the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) during his first eight months in office, now wants to speed up the pace of negotiations to reduce the number of long-range nuclear missiles and bombs in U.S. and Soviet arsenals.

Officials declined to provide details of discussions on the new U.S. arms proposal. “It’s being worked at a very high level,” said one. But they said it may include revised versions of pending U.S. proposals on verification as well as “some movement” on the long-debated issue of limits on cruise missiles.

Tangible progress in the START talks would improve the chances for a Bush-Gorbachev summit later this year, Administration officials have said. In addition, prospects for a summit are said to have been boosted by the swift pace of East-West negotiations over conventional forces in Europe.

Officially, however, Administration spokesmen remain noncommittal. “Our position remains that a summit meeting will be appropriate at some point, but we are not there yet,” a State Department official said.

The START talks, which began under President Ronald Reagan in 1985, are aimed at reducing the two superpowers’ arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons--the roughly 25,000 missile warheads and bombs with which each country could annihilate the other.

During the Reagan Administration, U.S. and Soviet negotiators agreed to the framework of a treaty under which those weapons would be reduced by more than 25%, including cuts of almost 50% in long-range ballistic missile warheads, the most dangerous nuclear weapons.

But significant differences remain. One involves sea-launched cruise missiles, which the Soviet Union wants to ban or limit but the U.S. Navy wants to keep. Other issues are how to count and verify the number of air-launched cruise missiles in each country’s bombers and how each country can verify that the other is keeping its word.

On the positive side, Administration officials say they have been cheered by two factors in the Soviet position on START.

First, Soviet officials appear to have eased their opposition to U.S. research on defenses against nuclear missiles--the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as “Star Wars.” Although the Soviet Union still objects to the program, some officials believe that the Kremlin might accept continued U.S. research and testing--in part, because Soviet experts don’t believe a workable defensive system can be devised.

Second, Moscow appears to have taken the Administration’s proposals on verification seriously, officials said.

“If they had wanted to, they could have come back and said . . . ‘We’re totally opposed to this,’ but they didn’t,” one official said. Instead, the Soviets have been studying the proposals and have promised that Gorbachev will make a formal response soon, officials said.

The verification proposals, offered by U.S. negotiators at the START talks in Geneva in June, include allowing each country to inspect the other’s missile factories even before a treaty is ratified.

Issue of Surprise Attack

Another U.S. proposal that officials said the Soviets have taken seriously is a ban on tests of “short time-of-flight missiles.” These are high-speed nuclear missiles that could hit targets in seven minutes or less after being launched from submarines, thus making a surprise attack more possible.

The new U.S. arms control proposal will also be on the agenda of talks later this month between Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, officials said.

Those talks, which will also cover the prospects for a U.S.-Soviet summit, will be held Sept. 22-23 at a lodge and at a log cabin in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons. The meeting is the result of an agreement between Baker and Shevardnadze to give each other a chance to see more of their countries than just Washington and Moscow.

McManus reported from Washington and Lauter from Kennebunkport, Me. Staff writer Robert C. Toth also contributed to this report.