Chancellor Helmut Kohl now speaks of linking talks on these weapons to reductions in nonnuclear forces in Europe.

The second set of negotiations, involving NATO and the Warsaw Pact, is intended to set the mandate for formal talks on reducing conventional, or nonnuclear, forces in Europe.

Emerging from a 90-minute meeting dominated by the negotiations on conventional, or nonnuclear, forces in Europe, both officials said that they needed to report back to their nations' allies and that they would meet again in the next few days.

Nothing measures the decline of nuclear weapons more accurately than the increase in the nonnuclear forces that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization keeps so reluctantly for the defense of its "Central Front" in Germany.

And as long as that does not change, he said, NATO has to maintain its doctrine of "flexible response," which means maintaining sufficiently varied nuclear and nonnuclear forces to deter the Soviet Union.

He knows the allies won't put up the money to establish a balance of nonnuclear forces.

On another front, Moscow presented a new compromise last week on the main obstacle to an agreement cutting nonnuclear forces in Europe.

The stockpile reached its peak in the 1970's as the allies insisted nuclear arms were needed to balance the Soviets' superiority in nonnuclear forces.

The North Atlantic alliance, after four decades of grandiose spending and constant anxiety about the Soviet military buildup, no longer rates Moscow's nonnuclear forces even as a threat.

The SIOP also controls the use and deployment of nonnuclear war-fighting forces in the event of a conflict, nuclear or otherwise.