June 23, 1992

SCIENTISTS in search of clues to environmental change are beginning to examine the reconnaissance treasures of the cold war, gathered by spy satellites, jets, ships and submarines at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. The main focus is archives of secret reconnaissance data compiled during the cold war that promise to shed light on such environmental trends as global warming. But the way has also been cleared, at least in principle, for scientists to redirect some of the nation's reconnaissance gear to collect new data of purely ecological interest.

When the Democratic Party gathers in Madison Square Garden to nominate its Presidential candidate next month, delegates, party officials and members of the press are expected to bring in 1,000 or more cellular telephones, making it the first political convention of the cellular age. That means people with small inexpensive radio scanners both inside and near the Garden could lock into these phone signals as easily as a motorist tunes into a station on a car radio.

Dr. Bernard W. Harleston has resigned as president of the City College of New York after 11 often tumultuous years of leading a school that has served generations of New York's poor and aspiring students. His tenure began amid a fiscal crisis and ended in anguishing controversies over a professor's racially charged remarks and the trampling deaths of nine young people at a campus event.

With the cold war over and the Soviet Union gone, Germany sometimes seems unsure whether it needs an army at all any more. The political consensus that made Germany, as a member of NATO, a bulwark against the Soviet threat for more than 35 years has been fraying at the edges since the threat disappeared. For some of those in uniform, many of them draftees, the question is why they have to serve at all.

Bayerische Motoren Werke A.G., which produces BMW motorcycles, sports cars and sedans, is expected to announce on Tuesday that it will build an assembly plant near Spartanburg, S.C., that would make its first cars in 1996. BMW's new venture will be the first foray by a German car company into American manufacturing since Volkswagen A.G. closed its ill-fated Pennsylvania assembly plant in 1988, after toting up huge losses. It would also put BMW in a league with Japanese auto makers like Toyota, Nissan, Honda and Mazda, all of which have set up assembly operations in the United States in the last decade and have been leaders in low-cost mass production.