Soviets Remove Major Obstacle to Arms Treaty

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. —  Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, in a concession that appeared to remove the single most important obstacle to the conclusion of a strategic arms reduction treaty, said Friday that the Soviet Union has dropped its demand that the pact be contingent on limiting U.S. efforts to develop new anti-missile defenses.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III said the Soviet concession represented “a positive development” in negotiations toward a treaty that would cut the nuclear offensive arsenals of the superpowers about 50%, a senior U.S. aide said. But American officials are still seeking clarification of the new Soviet position, which they disclosed in a briefing to reporters during two days of talks here.

The Soviets also eased their demand that a START treaty include limits on sea-launched cruise missiles, although the key difficulty of verifying limits on these weapons remained unresolved.

More Pressure Seen

The unexpected Soviet moves appeared certain to increase pressure on the Bush Administration to respond with comparable concessions. That may well lead the White House, in turn, to bring new pressure on Congress to make decisions on the defense budget that would permit the United States to change its negotiating stance in the START talks.

The Administration has already come under fire from Democratic leaders and some arms control experts, who have accused Bush of being timid in his response to the initiatives of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The START negotiations, under way since 1984, have been described as 80% to 90% completed during the Ronald Reagan Administration, and Bush aides have expressed hope that the treaty might be finished by the end of 1990. That timetable will probably be accelerated by the new developments, although important differences on mobile missiles and overall verification differences remain to be resolved.

The Soviet moves, which reverse longstanding insistence that the United States curb missile defense efforts such as the Strategic Defense Initiative, known as “Star Wars,” were described with some ambiguity in a nine-page letter from Gorbachev to Bush on a range of arms control initiatives.

Baker, at the meetings with Shevardnadze here following delivery of the letter, asked the Soviet official directly whether the tie between missile defenses and a START offensive weapon agreement had now been dropped. Shevardnadze’s assurance that it had been dropped led a senior U.S. official to read the following statement:

“They have dropped their linkage between completing and implementing an agreement with START and achieving a defense and space accord, including questions dealing with the ABM treaty.”

Another senior official, asked whether the Soviets had provided any more detailed description of their new position or its rationale, shook his head.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 severely curtails missile defenses on both sides. The amount of research, development and testing of new types of missile-defense devices, such as space-based exotic beam weapons, has been a source of bitter dispute between the United States and Soviet Union since the START talks began.

‘Continued Commitment’

The senior U.S. official added that “we have made clear the President’s continued commitment to the Strategic Defense Initative,” an assurance to the conservative supporters of “Star Wars” that Bush has not deserted the program. Congress has consistently cut Administration requests for SDI funding, however, and the Administration itself has scaled back the program’s goal from Reagan’s original, grandiose vision of a leakproof nationwide shield against missile attack to a more limited system that would guard against accidental launches--and that not until the next century.

Shevardnadze also offered two more concessions which also appeared aimed at breaking the remaining logjams in the START talks.

One was the proposal that limits on sea-launched cruise missiles, which Moscow has sought as part of a START treaty, could be part of a separate agreement. But a senior Soviet official said his government still wants to see those missiles cut at the same time a START pact is signed. And a senior U.S. official warned that the Bush Administration still believes that limits on sea-launched cruise missiles would be virtually impossible to verify.

In another apparent concession, Soviet officials said they had also softened their objection to testing of weapons to defend against nuclear missiles.

Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Viktor P. Karpov told reporters that his country was willing to agree to “some testing of devices in space,” and suggested that the two sides agree to a list of permissible tests. U.S. officials, who have long asserted a right to test exotic beam devices in space under the ABM Treaty, said they were willing to consider the Soviet approach.

That issue, too, had long posed an obstacle to the conclusion of a START treaty.

Although Gorbachev’s letter spelled out some of these moves and hinted at others, U.S. officials appeared surprised by the breadth of the Soviet concessions. Asked for their assessment of Gorbachev’s motives, several senior officials said simply, “Ask the Soviets.”

The conciliatory Soviet moves, moreover, came amid sharp disagreements between Baker and Shevardnadze over Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and human rights issues.

The two diplomats, meeting in a luxurious lodge beneath the snow-topped crags of the Teton mountains, spent almost two hours of an intense one-on-one session sparring over their policies on the Third World conflicts, officials said.

The two men became so absorbed in the argument that their meeting ran more than an hour overtime, leaving dozens of senior aides waiting in lobbies and hallways.

Bush Administration officials have often pointed to Soviet behavior in the Third World as a key test of whether the “new thinking” proclaimed by Gorbachev has any real impact on the Kremlin’s foreign policy.

According to a senior aide, Baker told Shevardnadze bluntly, “that when we take a look at some of the patterns of Soviet involvement (in the Third World) . . . there is, from our standpoint, a disturbing flow of arms.”

He said U.S. intelligence reports have detected “a surge of arms” to pro-Soviet regimes in Cambodia and Ethiopia, “a tremendous increase” in weapons shipments to the pro-Moscow government in Afghanistan, and a continued flow of weaponry from the Soviet Bloc to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

“That doesn’t seem to fit our understanding of what ‘new thinking’ is supposed to embody,” he quoted Baker as saying.

Shevardnadze rejected the criticism and accused the United States of acting irresponsibly by continuing its military aid to Muslim rebels in Afghanistan, officials said.

“In our view, the United States is violating its obligation as a guarantor of the Geneva accords (reached in 1988 to end the Afghan war),” a senior Soviet official said, pointing to continued U.S. arms shipments to the rebels. That agreement calls for an end to foreign aid to the rebels, but the Bush Administration has said that it will continue sending supplies as long as Moscow continues active support to the Kabul regime.

In the case of Nicaragua, Shevardnadze annoyed U.S. officials by sticking to his position that the Kremlin has stopped sending arms directly to the Sandinistas but is powerless to stop its allies like Cuba from doing so.

There were also sharp words over human rights, with Shevardnadze countering a U.S. list of Soviet citizens who have been refused the right to emigrate with a Kremlin compiled list of 40 alleged “political prisoners” in the United States.

The Baker-Shevardnadze arguments, as recounted by their aides, sounded like a return to the bad old days of U.S.-Soviet polemics before Gorbachev came to power. But officials on both sides took pains to stress that the dispute did not poison the two countries’ discussions on other issues.

“It was a discussion that was carried on in a way that suggested that these two men have established a working relationship” in which both sides “have to be honest and candid,” a U.S. official said.

Soviet officials said they were neither surprised nor upset by the U.S. criticism, but they also appeared anxious to turn the meeting’s attention toward arms control, the subject the Kremlin wants to keep at the center of the superpower agenda.

In addition to the major Soviet concessions, the two sides moved toward conclusion of several technical agreements on arms control.

Officials said they expect to sign today an agreement on “trial verification” to formalize a surprisingly fast acceptance by the two countries of a new principle in arms control talks: that experiments to test the feasibility of systems to verify the size and location of nuclear weapons can be conducted even before a treaty to reduce them is complete.

The Bush Administration proposed the idea in June, but Soviet officials insisted that the agreement to be signed today was devised by their experts in Moscow. The pact is a general agreement by both sides to begin working on ways to begin mutual verification of each others’ arsenals, a key part of any arms reduction effort.

Baker and Shevardnadze are also expected to sign an agreement to exchange information before any major test or exercise of strategic nuclear forces, a Soviet official said.

They may also sign an agreement to swap information about the size and location of each others’ chemical weapons, a step toward reducing those arsenals, officials said--although some officials said last-minute snags could delay that pact.

Baker and Shevardnadze met here, at a resort built by the late John D. Rockefeller III, as part of an agreement to begin varying their twice-yearly meetings beyond Washington and Moscow.