Russia Urges End of Nuclear Arms Alerts : Disarmament: The weapons would be taken off combat status, ending long confrontation.

MOSCOW —  In another dramatic disarmament proposal, Russia on Wednesday called for the world’s five acknowledged nuclear powers to put their weapons on “zero alert,” immediately taking them off combat status and, thus, ending four decades of nuclear confrontation.

In a message to the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, President Boris N. Yeltsin expanded his earlier proposal for 80% cuts in the Russian and American nuclear arsenals with a series of bold measures toward his goal of retaining only the minimum strategic forces necessary for deterrence.

Yeltsin said that Russia and the United States should take the first step back from the nuclear confrontation that remains from the Cold War by no longer targeting each other with weapons. The next step would be to store nuclear warheads away from the missiles and planes that carry them.

Ultimately, an international organization should control the remaining nuclear weapons, Yeltsin said, reviving a plan by Bernard Baruch, an American financier and presidential adviser. Baruch’s plan, rejected by the Soviet Union in 1946, called for a U.N. body with a monopoly on atomic weapons.

“The Cold War confrontation has become a thing of the past,” Yeltsin said in his message, “but we have inherited from it mountains of weapons, huge armies and entire defense-oriented industries employing millions of people. In the most dramatic terms, the gap that separates the new political realities and the military-technological situation finds expression in the fact that the strategic forces of nuclear powers . . . remain targeted on each others’ countries. The absurdity of such a situation is evident.”

In Washington, the White House had no comment on the Yeltsin proposal, which officials said they had not seen in anything but the most sketchy summaries. But a White House official expressed initial skepticism about it.

The official said there would be “no way to verify” that either side had, indeed, shifted its missiles so they no longer were targeted at their former enemies. He added, however, that storing warheads away from aircraft and missiles was “more verifiable and maybe something worth pursuing.”

The matter is likely to be discussed over the weekend, he said, when Secretary of State James A. Baker III visits Moscow. The official said it is “not too much of a stretch” to jump from the latest Russian proposal to totally removing nuclear weapons from the arsenals, a step he said the United States is not ready to take.

Rather, he said, Washington prefers to hold to the proposal Bush made in his State of the Union address last month, built around the elimination of multiple-warhead, land-based, long-range missiles, “the most threatening and destabilizing systems,” and a one-third reduction in U.S. submarine-launched intercontinental nuclear missiles.

In another of the far-reaching changes that Yeltsin is making in Moscow’s foreign policy, Russia also suggested on Wednesday that the United Nations create a special police force to protect human rights around the world. Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev, speaking to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, said the international community should undertake more effective monitoring of human rights and, if necessary, create new institutions to do so.

Reversing the insistence of the former Soviet Union that human rights is an internal matter for each country, Kozyrev recalled a proposal by Andrei D. Sakharov, the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate, for the United Nations to establish an independent body of moral leaders who would assess a situation in any country where human rights appeared under threat.

“We think that it is appropriate to develop a system of measures to make states more responsible for their policies,” Kozyrev said. The possible steps could include economic and other sanctions, he said, noting: “One could also consider the question of establishing international police forces specially trained for such operations.”

He said that such “ ‘interference,’ or, to put it more precisely, international support for democracy, helped us pull ourselves out of the mire of totalitarianism.”

Later, at the Geneva Institute of International Affairs, Kozyrev stressed Russia’s determination to play an active role in promoting disarmament and human rights and in developing a new world order no longer based on military power.

“The renewed Russia sees no need in maintaining parity and does not want to have as many weapons as the United States or any other power,” he said, acknowledging Moscow’s intent to proceed with disarmament as rapidly as international stability allows. “We have no strategic designs against anyone. But it is difficult to translate this political will into action. . . . The problem today is not what to do, but how.”

Yeltsin is scheduled to address the Russian legislature this morning on his recent meetings with President Bush, British Prime Minister John Major, French President Francois Mitterrand and other world leaders. Russian Television suggested that further initiatives are possible.

Kozyrev, who read Yeltsin’s message to the 39-nation U.N. Disarmament Conference, said that total elimination of nuclear weapons would be the best solution for the giant arsenals of Russia and the United States.

“We are aware that this cannot be done overnight, and therefore we have to look for other, possibly less radical but no less effective ways of removing the nuclear threat,” Kozyrev said, outlining Yeltsin’s plan for radical but stage-by-stage cutbacks.

As an initial response to what he called “a landslide of disarmament,” Yeltsin proposed that the five acknowledged nuclear powers--Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States--exchange data on the number and type of their warheads, the amount of fissionable material they have and installations where nuclear weapons are produced, stored and destroyed.

Yeltsin has already ordered the missiles that the former Soviet Union once aimed at the United States and its Western allies “de-targeted.” A top military official for the Commonwealth of Independent States, the successor to the old Soviet Union, said this has not yet begun. But Yeltsin’s aides say the process is under way in Russia and three other former Soviet republics, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

In his talks with Bush earlier this month at Camp David, Md., Yeltsin proposed that America respond with similar action. In his message to the disarmament conference, he expanded the proposal to include the other nuclear powers.

The next step under the Yeltsin plan would be even bolder--separation of the nuclear warheads from the missiles, planes, ships and submarines that carry them. “In this way, we would be guaranteed against their unauthorized or accidental use,” he said.

As sketched by Yeltsin, warheads would be taken off land-based missiles; nuclear missiles would be removed from submarines, which would then be confined to their home ports, and the nuclear arms on heavy bombers would be put into central storage. Extensive verification measures would be undertaken to prevent cheating.

Yeltsin also renewed his call for a global, space-based missile-defense system, developed and operated by Russia, the United States and possibly other nuclear powers, to enhance security during disarmament. Even as their relations improve, he acknowledged, there is still a threat from “adventurers, irresponsible politicians and terrorists.”

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang in Washington contributed to this report.