Visit revives confident mood between Powers

Press, 24 February 1988, Page 10

Visit revives confident mood between Powers

NZPA-Reuter Moscow Without achieving spectacular results, a visit to Moscow by the American Secretary of State, George Shultz, has revived a mood of confidence between the super-Powers that could bring rewards in arms control and on Afghanistan. Mr Shultz and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, emerged from their talks in equable mood and spoke of their discussions without the polemics that have followed some previous United States-Soviet encounters. The last big super-Power meeting, the December summit conference in Washington, was marked by bonhomie and fine rhetoric as President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, signed a treaty to eliminate medium-range nuclear missiles.

But that mood dissipated as the Geneva arms talks bogged down on efforts to achieve a strategic arms pact, and each side accused the other of going back on understandings reached in Washington. Now, after Mr Shultz’s visit, both Powers are again saying they may be able to achieve a treaty, roughly halving their strategic nuclear arsenals, in time for a new Reagan-Gorbachev summit conference scheduled for May or June in Moscow. "It’s more probable than I thought it would be before I came here,” one senior American official commented after the talks. American officials said the two sides had agreed on a new approach of tackling first the highly technical and time-consuming, but relatively uncontentious, issue of verification — measures to prevent cheating — and leaving thorny political problems until later.