Super-Powers show willing to crack ice

Press, 20 November 1982, Page 8

Super-Powers show willing to crack ice

NZPA Moscow The Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Nikolai Tikhonov, has said that President Ronald Reagan’s recently expressed hope for improved relations with Moscow “fully accords” with Soviet wishes and intentions. “The Soviet Union has been and is for normal, and even better, friendly relations with the United States Of America,” Mr Tikhonov told a large group of visiting American business leaders at a Kremlin banquet. “There were such relations in the past, and they can again become a reality.” Mr Tikhonov’s words were among the warmest addressed towards Washington by a senior Soviet official in many months, perhaps since relations plummeted after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in December, 1979. His remarks were quoted by Tass, the Soviet press agency. The cordiality was presumably in some part for the benefit of the 200 American business leaders gathered for a conference on ways to revive Soviet-American trade. But Mr Tikhonov’s speech was also the first on

United States-Soviet relations since the change, of leadership in the Kremlin, and since Mr Reagan made a series of conciliatory gestures in connection with the death of Leonid Brezhnev and his succession by Yuri Andropov. The Prime Minister emphasised that he spoke on behalf of the Soviet leadership, and he made clear that he was responding to the letter of condolences that Mr Reagan signed on November 11 after Mr Brezhnev’s death. “President Ronald Reagan has recently declared the wish of the United States to work in the direction of improving relations with the Soviet Union and expanding the fields, where our countries can co-operate with each other for mutual benefit,” said Mr Tikhonov, closely paraphrasing Mr Reagan’s message. “I can say that this fully accords with the Soviet Union’s wishes and intentions.” The balance of Mr Tikhonov’s relatively brief address echoed Soviet arguments that the cooling of SovietAmerican relations and the resulting withering of bi-

lateral trade has been the fault of the United States and its various sanctions and embargoes. The American Secretary of State, Mr George Shultz, has told the new Soviet leadership that the United States is ready to discuss problems between the super Powers, but wants Moscow to make the first move. At his first press conference since attending the funeral of Mr Brezhnev and meeting his successor, Mr Yuri Andropov, he made it clear that he saw the problems between the two countries to be largely of Soviet making. “We look for changes in behaviour or indications of a willingness to discuss them,” he said. “I think if you look at the problems that are before us, on the whole they are problems that they have created, and so a willingness to be less creative is what is called for here.” He made it clear that there would be no change in the Reagan Administration’s tough policy towards the Soviet Union, saying that it “is in place and will continue to be in place.”