Arms Control Issues Loom Over Malta Summit : Diplomacy: The subject is not officially on the agenda, but Gorbachev may have a surprise for Bush.

WASHINGTON —  Even though arms control is not formally on the Malta summit agenda, some Bush Administration officials expect Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to make new offers to speed up the negotiations now under way on reducing long-range nuclear arms and non-nuclear weapons in Europe.

But for Gorbachev, there is a significant risk, these officials say. Any such dramatic move could trigger a negative reaction from President Bush. Viewing it as grandstanding, the President is likely to respond by slowing the negotiations to prevent Gorbachev from stealing the credit for progress or by showing his displeasure in some other aspect of U.S.-Soviet relations.

“One thing Gorbachev hasn’t learned yet is not to play games with us in these kinds of circumstances,” a senior State Department official said. “I suspect he’ll play some game, either some big START (strategic nuclear arms) initiative . . . or some CFE (Conventional Forces in Europe) initiative plunked on the table--all of it aimed at either getting us to buy it or look uncooperative and uncreative when we leave Malta.”

Not everyone expects a dramatic Gorbachev move. “This is not a summit in which you try something and want to run the risk of getting it thrown back in your face,” one U.S. official said in discussing the likely Soviet approach to Malta. “This is a win-win summit. You do not want to risk bold steps that end up casting a pall over the meeting after it’s over.”

Whatever Gorbachev’s strategy at the summit, the concern of Administration officials about the potential impact of any step involving arms control--long the centerpiece of U.S.-Soviet summits--reflects the unique power that issue still has to force itself into the spotlight in a significant, even disruptive way.

One factor pushing Gorbachev toward taking risks at Malta is that his political priorities may be different and his requirements more urgent than Bush’s, particularly in the wake of the East European upheavals in the weeks since the Malta meeting was announced.

Even before that, the Soviet leader clearly was more anxious for a START agreement than Bush has been, according to U.S. officials.

Soviet negotiators also have acknowledged greater emphasis on START than on the CFE talks. While the Soviets admit that more savings can be achieved through conventional force cuts, according to American officials, they believe START will free more high-technology manpower for civilian work--a critical element in reviving the Soviet economy.

More subjective factors may also be in play, such as Soviet awareness that nuclear weapons pose a greater threat to their homeland than tanks and ground troops.

Bush set ambitious deadlines of mid-1990 to complete both the START agreement, which would cut offensive nuclear arms by about 50%, and the CFE treaty, which would cut manpower, tanks and other weapons of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact to lower, equal ceilings. Soviet ground forces would be cut more than 50%, while NATO forces would be reduced about 10%.

The almost unanimous view of U.S. officials, however, is that neither of the negotiations are likely to be completed by mid-1990. A few matters of principle still separate the U.S. and Soviet sides in START, but the delay results mainly from difficulties in ironing out technical details. With CFE, the United States and its European allies are still arguing about exactly what NATO should propose to the Warsaw Pact.

Moreover, Bush did not express the timetable for finishing START very forcefully. He said he hoped the treaty would be ready by the time of the arms control summit that he and Gorbachev have scheduled for late next spring or early summer in the United States.

Key U.S. arms negotiators said they did not interpret his words as marching orders. And while not ruling out completion by then, they said the START treaty would more likely be finished in late 1990 or early 1991, in time for signing at a third Bush-Gorbachev summit, expected to be held in the Soviet Union in mid-1991.

Formal completion of START a year before the U.S. presidential elections has “a certain political logic to it,” as one official said.

Similarly, Bush in May called for a CFE agreement in six to 12 months. But his new chief negotiator at those Vienna talks, R. James Woolsey, later said the clock on that deadline did not begin running until September because four months were needed for NATO to convert Bush’s words into a formal new proposal to the Warsaw Pact.

As for CFE, even before the upheaval in Eastern Europe, the consensus among U.S. officials was that the conventional arms treaty would not be completed by mid-1990, as Bush initially envisioned. White House officials have offered only a 50-50 chance that the agreement will be finished even by the end of 1990, and some experts forecast completion in 1991.

These conventional force talks are more complex than START in several respects.

One major difficulty is defining what weapons to include in the proposed agreement and designing verification measures to police the treaty. A particular sticking point is the Warsaw Pact proposal to limit only “strike,” or ground attack, warplanes, thereby excluding more than 5,000 of its warplanes because those aircraft are officially assigned air defense and training missions. Since the aircraft could in fact be used in offensive roles as well, NATO strongly opposes this approach.

“If Gorbachev insists on his one-sided definition of aircraft,” said Ronald Lehman, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, “it’s highly unlikely that we’ll get a CFE treaty.”

Another complication, less tangible but equally significant, is that the CFE talks are bloc-to-bloc rather than one-on-one negotiations. Proposals must be coordinated in time-consuming consultations among the 16 NATO nations and seven Warsaw Pact countries.

The NATO members have always been independent; the age-old animosity between Greeks and Turks continue to delay agreement on the NATO position, for example. Now, Soviet allies are becoming increasingly independent within the Warsaw Pact, and this is creating new problems for Gorbachev that are expected to be reflected in his maneuvering at Malta.

“Gorbachev will push hard (at Malta) . . . to really rev up the CFE process quickly,” one highly placed U.S. expert on Soviet affairs predicts, because “that negotiation is about to be overtaken by events in Eastern Europe. In some ways, it already has,” he said, citing the end of “ideological coherence” in the Warsaw Pact nations and the increasing divergence from Moscow of the foreign and security policies of East European states.

“There’s still a window . . . probably a year or two” before the CFE negotiations become irrelevant, he added. Before the window of opportunity closes, Gorbachev would like to nail down the deal to help stabilize conditions in Eastern Europe and legitimize the Soviet presence there while the agreed force reductions are carried out, the official said.

The best way for Gorbachev to speed up the CFE talks, he continued, would be to drop aircraft from the list of conventional weapons to be reduced. Moscow insisted on including aircraft in the first place, and it could now be the one to set the issue aside for subsequent talks.

The Soviet leader may also try to speed up CFE by persuading Bush to ease U.S. verification demands for the treaty, thereby simplifying and smoothing the way to agreement.

The Pentagon is insisting on tough measures that affect mainly West Europeans, whose territories lie in the Atlantic-to-the-Urals zone covered by the negotiations. The potential impact of verification inspections on U.S. facilities would be minimal. The West Europeans would prefer on-site inspections only after reductions have occurred, to ensure that no cheating occurs after the cuts, and would forgo monitoring the reductions as they occur.

“The Soviets could live with the European view” on CFE verification measures, the official added, if Bush can overrule the Defense Department on the matter.

In the START talks, Gorbachev may seek to give new impetus to the current negotiations by outlining his vision of the next phase of strategic talks--START II, as some experts refer to them.

An obvious proposal would be to call for a second 50% cut, which would reduce the arsenals of each superpower to 3,000 long-range offensive nuclear weapons. Or, if Gorbachev continues to hold utopian views on disarmament, he could expound on the goal of a “minimum deterrence” force of only 500 nuclear warheads on each side.

“Just discussing broad goals for START II, and setting a schedule of ministerial talks (between Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze), will increase pressure on the bureaucracies on both sides to finish START I,” the official added. For beyond the well-known skepticism toward arms agreements in the Pentagon, U.S. negotiators in START believe the Soviet military is also foot-dragging in discernible ways.

START I needs no huge breakthroughs to be completed, officials said, thanks largely to Soviet concessions in September. One or two important political issues need to be solved, however, and ideas may be exchanged at Malta on how to tackle them in preparation for the arms control summit next year, when they can be formally resolved.

Most important of these issues is how many air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) will be attributed to each bomber. “We think it’s not a treaty buster,” said one U.S. official, both on its merits and because Gorbachev has said the ALCM issue is “ripe” for solution.

Of the 6,000 offensive nuclear weapons permitted under START, no more than 4,900 can be warheads on ballistic missiles. The rest would be bombs and warheads on bombers and cruise missiles.

Since aircraft are comparatively slow flying and recallable, the United States argues they are less threatening than ballistic warheads and that their construction should be encouraged in future forces.

This can be done by “discounting” these weapons in the START treaty, i.e., counting ALCM-delivered warheads less than ballistic missile warheads. So the United States wants to “attribute” to each aircraft a fixed number of ALCMs--10 to the B-52, for example--no matter how many they in fact carry. But the Soviets want to count every missile each bomber carries, which for the B-52 is as many as 22.

Times staff writer Doyle McManus contributed to this story.