Warsaw Pact

BUDAPEST, Hungary -- The Cold War came to a formal end here yesterday with the official dissolution of the Warsaw Pact military alliance.The Pact's Political Consultative Committee -- made up of the foreign and defense ministers of the six member-states -- "decided that they will liquidate the military bodies and structure of the Pact by March 31, 1991," said a statement issued after a three-hour meeting yesterday in the Hungarian capital."

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Fighting global terror has replaced Cold War deterrence as NATO's core mission, President Bush said yesterday in urging European allies to "come with us" to help disarm Iraq. Bush's comments came as he prepared to meet with NATO leaders during the next several days. Behind the scenes, he is expected to try gaining coalition backing for possible military action against Baghdad. A decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the trans-Atlantic alliance that once stood sentry against Russian aggression must remake itself to help defeat the followers of Osama bin Laden and similar terrorist groups, Bush said.

PARIS -- Leaders of the Warsaw Pact and NATO put their signatures on a landmark treaty here yesterday, slashing conventional weapons and sealing the end of Europe's post-war division into superpower blocs that once threatened to annihilate each other.The treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, signed five years to the day after President Ronald Reagan met Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev at their initial summit, will lead to the destruction of a quarter- million pieces of military hardware in bringing the states of the Warsaw Pact and North Atlantic Treaty Organization down to equal levels of weapons.

A MOST familiar face - a huge billboard of J.R. Ewing - jars any American driving into town from the Bucharest airport. Is this an ad for subtitled reruns of the TV series "Dallas"? No. It's an ad, like dozens all over Bucharest, for Lukoil, the Russian oil company. They own an oil refinery and gas stations all around Romania. And J.R. is their poster boy. Because of J.R., Lukoil may be the most discussed Russian presence in Romania. But it's hardly the only one there, or elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe.

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- The leaders of the NATO yesterday extended the offer of a limited partnership to the former Warsaw Pact nations -- including Russia itself -- in a historic move that begins to shift the Western alliance's very reason for existence."

The mighty Warsaw Pact died with a whimper, not a bang. The ripples were hardly noticed as a world braced for explosions in a different theater. The conservative movement taking hold in Moscow can reverse most of the reforms of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but not this. Moscow unburdened itself of Eastern Europe, and cannot get it back.Born in 1955 as Moscow's response to West Germany's joining NATO, the Warsaw Pact created the fact or illusion of a mighty army of five million fully integrated under Soviet command, ready to roll West at a moment's notice.

TRAVEMUENDE, Germany -- European defense ministers embraced yesterday a Clinton administration plan that offers former Soviet republics and East European countries closer cooperation with NATO but not early membership in the alliance.The plan, which Defense Secretary Les Aspin outlined in Travemuende at a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, raised the possibility of the eventual assimilation of the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO. The plan is also a gesture to Germany, which has pressed to expand the 16-nation alliance to include nations of the former Warsaw Pact.

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization reached agreement yesterday on the outline of a radical reorganization that would mean deep cuts in its overall troop level in Europe and the creation of a rapid-reaction corps for sudden hot spots.The number of active U.S. troops now in Europe is estimated at 320,000, and officials agreed that the reorganization, driven by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, could cut that figure in half.The reductions in the 16-nation alliance would begin at the end of 1994 and are to be completed by the end of the decade.

Budapest.--Who needs NATO now and what for? Is it merely an anachronism -- this organization created more than 40 years ago to protect Western European democracies from a Warsaw Pact attack across the center of Europe? Now, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself have disbanded. Should NATO follow suit? What useful purpose do NATO troops serve in a prosperous, united Western Europe committed to organizing its own defense? Is it time, finally, for the Yankees to go home?The issue was not put quite this bluntly at the high-level, unofficial NATO working-group meeting in Budapest last week.

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- In yet another sign that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was turning global politics upside down, the Russian president, Boris N. Yeltsin, wrote to NATO yesterday asking it to consider allowing Russia to become a member sometime in the future.Mr. Yeltsin's letter was sent in conjunction with the first meeting ever held at the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization between NATO foreign ministers and those of the former Warsaw Pact -- the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania.

NEVER was a military alliance so successful. Born of fear and steely resolve, NATO triumphed without firing a shot. When examples are sought of military preparedness that prevented war, NATO is first.The 50th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, today through Sunday in Washington, was planned as the greatest summit ever. The heads of state and government from the 19 NATO members, three of them new to the club, were to celebrate with lavish self-congratulations.The parades, dinners and balls would constitute one of the great parties ever.

MOSCOW -- Igor Podgorny has a simple way to explain Russia's problem with NATO plans to expand its membership eastward into former Soviet bloc nations ."Suppose I have a nice little summer cottage," the thermonuclear physicist and World War II veteran says with a big, friendly smile."And suppose my neighbor gets a submachine gun. He points it toward my summer cottage. He tells me he just wants to ensure his security, even though he feels peaceful toward me."The United States says it wants to be considered friendly.

CHALLENGE ANY historian to name an alliance more successful than NATO.There is none.Yet in every decade since the 1950s, throngs of foreign-policy experts have asserted that NATO faced some new crisis.Now comes the crisis of the '90s -- the fragility of democracy in Eastern Europe and Russia, and the loss of a common enemy -- and therefore, it is said, NATO must admit Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and other nations of the former Warsaw Pact.This remedy may seem all the more urgent as Russian forces keep inflicting wanton destruction on Chechnya.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- Hungarians waited in vain for them in 1956, when Soviet troops smashed democratic dreams in Budapest.Czechs and Slovaks hoped they might come in 1968, when Warsaw Pact tanks crushed the flowering of Prague Spring.Now, in 1994, North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops may finally be bound for Eastern Europe -- on missions of cooperation and partnership, not confrontation.NATO troops appear likely to participate in exercises in the region later this year now that the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia are on board for Partnership for Peace -- President Clinton's initiative to increase the alliance's military and economic ties to Eastern Europe without giving the region a true security guarantee.

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- The leaders of the NATO yesterday extended the offer of a limited partnership to the former Warsaw Pact nations -- including Russia itself -- in a historic move that begins to shift the Western alliance's very reason for existence."

TRAVEMUENDE, Germany -- European defense ministers embraced yesterday a Clinton administration plan that offers former Soviet republics and East European countries closer cooperation with NATO but not early membership in the alliance.The plan, which Defense Secretary Les Aspin outlined in Travemuende at a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, raised the possibility of the eventual assimilation of the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO. The plan is also a gesture to Germany, which has pressed to expand the 16-nation alliance to include nations of the former Warsaw Pact.

WASHINGTON -- The Soviet Union and East European countries will have to destroy almost five times as many tanks as the Western alliance under the historic new treaty establishing parity in non-nuclear arms between the former Cold War foes, Secretary of State James A. Baker III disclosed yesterday.Independent arms control authorities here described the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, to be signed in Paris on Nov. 18, as virtually "a unilateral Soviet disarmament agreement."The only significant cuts the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies will have to make will be in tank forces, they said, while the Warsaw Pact, mainly the Soviets, will have to destroy tens of thousands of other weapons as well.

.TC COPENHAGEN, Denmark - The North Atlantic Treaty Organization made an unprecedented offer to Eastern European nations and the Soviet Union to participate in sweeping political and military cooperation.On the first day of a two-day meeting here yesterday, the NATO foreign ministers issued a declaration reaching out to their onetime Communist enemies in the now-disbanded Warsaw Pact military alliance.However, the 16-member NATO appeared to close the door on the issue of admitting Eastern European members into the Atlantic Alliance because it does not wish to "isolate" the Soviet Union or see "a new division of Europe," the delegates said in their statement.

Budapest.--Who needs NATO now and what for? Is it merely an anachronism -- this organization created more than 40 years ago to protect Western European democracies from a Warsaw Pact attack across the center of Europe? Now, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself have disbanded. Should NATO follow suit? What useful purpose do NATO troops serve in a prosperous, united Western Europe committed to organizing its own defense? Is it time, finally, for the Yankees to go home?The issue was not put quite this bluntly at the high-level, unofficial NATO working-group meeting in Budapest last week.

Alexander Dubcek, the Czechoslovak leader whose bol attempt in 1968 to give his country "socialism with a human face" was crushed by an invasion of Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops, died yesterday. He was 70.He died yesterday morning at Homolse Hospital from "failure of vital organs," the official state news agency CSTK reported. Mr. Dubcek had been hospitalized since an automobile accident Sept. 1.The death of Mr. Dubcek may complicate the political situation in Czechoslovakia, which plans to split into two independent states Jan. 1.Mr.