Baker to Push for Tight Soviet A-Arms Control

MEXICO CITY —  Secretary of State James A. Baker III plans to seek increased U.S.-Soviet cooperation to keep Soviet nuclear weapons under firm control and hopes to revive a proposal for formal U.S.-Soviet consultations on the issue when he visits Moscow this week, a U.S. official said Sunday.

Baker, reflecting the Bush Administration’s continuing concern over the nuclear issue, plans to meet with Soviet Defense Minister Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov and also plans to raise the subject with leaders of the country’s 12 increasingly independent republics, the official said.

“We’re going there with the intention of discussing this issue broadly with Soviet leaders,” an official told reporters traveling on the Air Force plane that brought Baker here to Mexico, the first stop on a journey that will take him to the Soviet Union and the Middle East.

“We will be discussing it with a wide range of the leadership--and we will be discussing it not just with the union leadership but with leadership from the republics as well,” the official said.

Among the ideas Baker will discuss is a proposal for a formal U.S.-Soviet “working group on nuclear deterrence, stability and reassurance,” the official said.

But that idea, first put forward by U.S. officials last year, has been left “in a holding pattern” because the political situation in the Soviet Union has been changing so rapidly, he said.

Administration officials have said they do not believe there has been any danger of Soviet nuclear weapons being used, either deliberately or accidentally, during the last tumultuous three weeks.

But they have moved quickly to attempt to learn who controls the Soviet nuclear arsenal and to encourage Soviet leaders to work out an agreement on the issue.

The issue also reflects the confused state of American dealings with the Soviet republics as they invent a new form of confederation. Baker is seeking meetings with leaders from every one of the 12 republics that remain in the Soviet Union, as well as officials in the central government of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in part because officials don’t know who will turn out to be important as the disintegration of the country continues.

Baker has already scheduled meetings with Gorbachev, Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin and Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan.

“This kind of an issue we would be discussing with not just the defense minister (and) the head of the KGB but also with Nazarbayev, Gorbachev (and) Yeltsin,” the official said.

An aide pointed out that Baker has never before sought a meeting with a Soviet defense minister, although this will be his 10th visit to the Soviet Union in less than three years.

Gorbachev, Yeltsin and other Soviet officials have said that they are moving the country’s nuclear weapons into the territory of the Russian Federation and are working on new procedures to ensure that they cannot be used without proper authorization. But they have been vague about exactly what safeguards and procedures they plan to employ.

Baker enunciated the Administration’s main concern at a press conference last week, saying: “We do not want to see the transformation that’s taking place in the Soviet Union either create or add to the problems of nuclear weapons proliferation. And I think that it would probably be on balance best if . . . they ended up under one central command authority.”

Baker proposed a formal working group on nuclear “reassurance”--which would allow U.S. and Soviet officials to cooperate on the issue on a regular basis--during talks last year with then-Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, but events in the Soviet Union moved so fast that the idea was never put into action.

U.S. military officials have discussed safeguards on nuclear weapons with their Soviet counterparts over the past four years but on a more informal basis than the one proposed by Baker.

In particular, U.S. officials have been urging the Soviets to adopt the U.S.-developed concept of “permissive action links,” which impose a series of high-technology safeguards on the detonation of nuclear warheads.

The exchanges began with a series of secret talks in 1987 between Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, then chief of the Soviet general staff.

Akhromeyev, who in more recent years was increasingly critical of Gorbachev’s concessions to the West, committed suicide last month after the failure of the coup.

Baker also pursued the issue with Alexander A. Bessmertnykh, the Soviet foreign minister from January until last month, when Gorbachev fired him for failing to speak out against the coup.