Baker to Seek Soviet Halt of 3rd World Missile Sales

HELSINKI, Finland —  Secretary of State James A. Baker III plans to challenge the Soviet Union this week to join a Western effort to halt the sale of ballistic missile technology to Third World countries, a senior Bush Administration official said Monday.

Baker, who is scheduled to begin his first visit to Moscow on Wednesday, particularly wants to press Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to stop missile exports to radical Arab countries like Libya and Syria, the official said.

Soviet policy “can’t get . . . much worse than it is right now,” he said.

“We think this is one of the reasons that regional conflict (in the Third World) are more dangerous than they used to be . . . because of the proliferation of these missiles and chemical weapons,” he said.

The issue of proliferation is one of several new issues that Baker plans to take up with the Soviet leader during his two days in Moscow on Wednesday and Thursday. Other such issues include terrorism, drug trafficking and international threats to the environment.

“We are seeking an active, constructive, positive and expanding relationship with the Soviet Union,” Baker told reporters on his Air Force plane en route here. “We want to test (Gorbachev’s) ‘new thinking’ across the full range of our relations.”

Officials traveling with the secretary said he plans to propose a date for resuming the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in the second half of June. But Baker will not propose a date for President Bush’s first summit meeting with Gorbachev, because Bush does not yet feel ready for such a session, they said.

On the issue of ballistic missiles, the senior official acknowledged that the Soviet Union has shown no interest in joining the seven-nation Western group that has pledged to stop missile exports.

“We’d like to talk to them further about that,” he said. “If they’re not going to be willing to engage multilaterally with other countries that are interested in controlling proliferation, then maybe we can engage them bilaterally.”

The group, the Missile Technology Control Regime, includes six North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and Japan.

But it has failed to restrain the Soviet Union from selling thousands of Scud surface-to-surface missiles to such countries as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The senior official suggested that Gorbachev’s response on the missile issue could influence the U.S. attitude toward Soviet participation in the search for peace in the Middle East.

“We welcome all the help we can get, and if they want to come in as real players, that doesn’t disturb us,” he said. “But we need more than just rhetoric, we need some action to support the words. . . . They can start by normalizing their relations with the state of Israel. They could start by ceasing their support for radical regimes in the area such as Libya.”