EDITORIAL : MISTAKE IN MADRID EXPANDING NATO IS LIKELY TO DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD.

In hailing the decision of NATO nations to accept three new members, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the Western alliance was reversing what the Soviet Union had done ``salami slice by salami slice.''

Credit Albright with a clever metaphor. But the salami she talked about is more than NATO and the United States need to chew. And all that talk in Madrid about NATO expansion making the world safer for peace and democracy is, we fear, so much baloney.

We are more inclined to agree with a bipartisan group of foreign-affairs and defense experts who warned last month that the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization represents ``a policy error of historic proportions.''

The critics included former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Paul Nitze, former President Reagan's top arms-control negotiator. The predicted NATO expansion - and once started, it almost certainly won't stop with just three nations - would play into the hands of anti-democratic elements in Russia and increase opposition in Russia's Duma, or parliament, to further arms-reduction agreements.

John Matlock, a U.S. ambassador to Moscow during the Reagan and Bush administrations, pointed out that Western Europe no longer faces the threat of a massive invasion from the east. Instead, NATO needs to concern itself more with potential regional conflicts, such as those in the former Yugoslavia, and the presence in Russia of nuclear warheads that can strike European capitals.

We fear that NATO expansion might exacerbate rather than minimize regional conflicts. Alienating Russia would only make arms-reduction negotiations more difficult.

We can understand why leaders in Western Europe want to push the boundary as far as possible from their own doorsteps. Poland's appeal for more security - its territory was violated by the Soviet Union as well as Germany at the beginning of World War II - is especially moving.

Nevertheless, the expansion of NATO threatens to do more harm than good. It's a potentially costly extension of Cold War thinking at a time when world leaders should be looking for innovative approaches in dealing with entirely new conditions, especially in Russia.

The next stop for the treaty authorizing the expansion of NATO is the U.S. Senate. We hope the Senate takes its responsibilities seriously when it debates ratification and doesn't blindly assume that a bigger military alliance necessarily is a better one.