Shultz Flying Home; No Date Set for Summit

Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko held a brief second meeting here Wednesday but set no date for a U.S.-Soviet summit meeting and reached no agreements that could move the Geneva arms control talks off dead center.

Later, during his flight home, Shultz told reporters that he and Gromyko simply restated familiar positions on arms limitations during their meetings Tuesday and Wednesday. But he added: “There is a tendency for everyone to restate their positions as being right. This may be a clarifying process; at least I hope so.”

He said no new subjects came up during the final 20-minute meeting Wednesday morning.

U.S. and Soviet officials in Vienna had declined to say if Shultz and Gromyko had set the date for a summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. But Shultz later told reporters on the airplane that no date for such a meeting has been set, although both countries continue to say that, in principle, they want one.

Shultz, asked by an interviewer for Austrian television why neither the Soviet nor the American side would say anything here about summit plans, said:

“Well, that’s because there is nothing to add to what is already known, and what is known is that the two leaders have exchanged letters in which they both have said to each other that they believe a meeting would be useful and, as yet, we have not been able to settle on when or where that meeting might take place. So there is no further information to give, and therefore we did not give any.”

Meaningful Restrictions

Shultz said he believes that Gromyko realizes that it would be impossible to negotiate meaningful restrictions on missile defense research despite repeated Soviet complaints about the U.S. “Star Wars” space defense research program.

“We don’t even know for sure what research on strategic defense is,” he said. “You can’t put a circle around it and say that is it.”

Shultz also said that Gromyko gave no indication that the Soviet Union is prepared to allow on-site inspections of its controversial radar system at Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, suggested last month that the Soviets might permit such an inspection.

Concerning the overall tone of Tuesday’s six-hour meeting with Gromyko, Shultz said, “I think it was a useful meeting--better to have had it than not to have had it. I think there is a lot to be said for hearing each other out fully and fairly. At the end I had things that I wanted to get through, and he didn’t say it was getting late--he heard me out to the end.”

‘Better Able to Cope’

Shultz said it is useful to rehash points of friction because “at least we start from somewhere and are better able to cope with it.”

The secretary of state flew back to the United States on Wednesday after taking part in ceremonies marking the 30th anniversary of the four-power treaty that re-established Austria as a free and independent nation.

The visit to Austria was the last official stop of a trip lasting more than two weeks, during which Shultz also dealt with complex issues and problems in West Germany, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Egypt and Jordan.

The ceremonials surrounding the Austrian anniversary gave the foreign ministers attending an opportunity to remind each other publicly that long and patient diplomacy can sometimes pay off.

Shultz, for example, spoke of the nine years that it took the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France after World War II to agree on an Austrian state treaty and honor a pledge they had jointly made in 1943 to restore Austrian independence.

“As the months and years of negotiations dragged on, there were many who condemned the negotiators as foot-dragging bureaucrats,” he told an audience of Austrian dignitaries and foreign ministers from 11 nations gathered at the Belvedere Palace in the heart of Vienna, where the state treaty was signed in 1955 by John Foster Dulles, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Harold Macmillan and Antoine Pinay.

“Yet in the end,” the secretary of state said, “patience was rewarded with success. This is a lesson we hope to see repeated in our negotiations with the Soviet Union here in Vienna and in Geneva. When governments on both sides of the East-West divide sit down with one another in a spirit of cooperation and good will, without illusions and with sufficient patience, we can find ways to work together for the benefit of all concerned.”

Concept of Neutrality

Shultz also spoke warmly of how Austrian leaders have “reinvigorated the concept of neutrality, calling their approach active neutrality and in that framework showing the world what a neutral nation can accomplish.”

Gromyko, in a brief speech, said: “With the Austrian state treaty, it was clearly shown that through negotiations, as difficult as they may be, even the most difficult international problems can be solved. What is needed is the presence of political will in all interested states.

“With its friends and allies, the U.S.S.R. will do all it can to affirm and deepen the process of detente in order to contain the arms race, the lunacy of the arms race, and not permit that it be extended to outer space.”

British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe said: “The state treaty reminds us that formal agreements can transform the political environment. The arms control agreements of the 1960s helped to lay the foundation for hope and confidence. We need more such foundations for the 1980s, and the West has made it clear that it is prepared to work for these.”

But as things stand now on the diplomatic front, the superpowers appear to be at a standstill, much as they were for nine years here in Vienna from 1946 to 1955 as they waited for a break on the Austrian treaty.

Don Cook reported from Vienna and Norman Kempster from Shannon, Ireland.