Moscow talks boost arms treaty hopes

Press, 24 February 1988, Page 10

Moscow talks boost arms treaty hopes

NZPA-Reuter Moscow United States and Soviet officials brief their respective allies today after Moscow talks boosted prospects for a strategic arms treaty and left the Americans convinced that Soviet troops will be leaving Afghanistan.

The American Secretary of State, George Shultz, flies to Brussels to meet N.A.T.O. Foreign Ministers, while the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, will be in Prague to talk to Warsaw Pact chiefs. The Moscow talks were the first in a series to prepare for a May or June summit conference in the Soviet capital. The discussions, which included a four-hour meeting yesterday between Mr Shultz and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, appeared to reinforce an increasingly comfortable working relationship between the super-Powers. “There has developed a way of talking to each other,” a senior American official told reporters.

“These (Soviets) are people who know the issues in breadth as well as depth.” While there was little drama in the agreements reached over two days, the progress was enough to satisfy both sides; American officials, echoing Mr Shevardnadze, said they were more hopeful than before that a treaty halving long-range strategic weapons could be completed for signing at the fourth summit conference between Mr Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan. The main arms control advance was joint orders to United States and Soviet negotiators at Geneva to produce in time for the next ShultzShevardnadze meeting on March 22 three docu-

ments aimed at verifying compliance with the proposed treaty. Mr Shultz insisted on tackling this matter now because verification will be vastly harder under a strategic accord that leaves the super-Powers with residual arsenals than under the pact signed last December that eliminates all United States and Soviet mediumrange missiles. Negotiators are labouring under considerable pressure, knowing that Mr Reagan and Mr Gorbachev have expressed a strong desire to sign a strategic agreement at the conference. “We’re not going to find ourselves in the position of having a calendar govern us on an important

issue like verification,” said a senior American official. He predicted that most remaining disputed items could be resolved fairly quickly once verification was sorted out. In their joint statement, the two sides again delayed a showdown over the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the extent of its limits on Mr Reagan’s “star wars” space shield against missiles by reaffirming language in the Washington summit conference communique in which they agreed to disagree. The American official predicted this issue would be the final issue of strategic treaty negotiations and need not be resolved now.