The government criticized White House officials Saturday for revealing details of a telephone conversation between Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Bush, who are locked in a NATO policy dispute.
Kohl and Bush spoke Friday in the latest attempt to resolve the feud over West Germany's call for early talks with the Warsaw Pact on reducing short-range nuclear missiles in Europe.Officials in Bonn refused to discuss the contents of the conversation, saying Bush and Kohl had agreed to keep their talk confidential. However, the White House later said the two leaders had failed to resolve their differences.
Kohl's chief spokesman Hans Klein said Saturday his government believed public disputes would reduce the chances of solving the problem before the May 29-30 NATO summit in Brussels.
The dispute between Bonn and Washington threatens to mar the harmony of the summit. Kohl's government is losing support among West Germans increasingly upset with their strategic role in NATO and wooed by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's overtures to the West.
Kohl wants talks on reducing the missiles to start soon and he wants to postpone a decision on modernizing the weapons until after next year's elections.
The United States opposes any negotiations on the grounds that NATO needs nuclear weapons to compensate for the overwhelming superiority of Soviet-bloc tanks, artillery and soldiers.