Agreements Reported on 5 Relatively Minor Issues

At the close of their three-day summit conference Thursday, President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev issued a joint statement summarizing their meetings and also announced the official agreement of their governments on five relatively minor issues.

Reagan and Gorbachev said that while “serious differences remain on a number of critical issues, . . . some greater understanding of each side’s view was achieved by the two leaders.”

The two decided that they will meet again in the future, first in the United States next year, then in the Soviet Union in 1987.

They reaffirmed previous promises that neither country wants war with each other and that neither country will “seek to achieve military superiority” over the other.

They said their representatives will accelerate their negotiations on arms control in Geneva, and the leaders repeated previous pledges that they do not want “an arms race in space.”

GENERAL EXCHANGES

An agreement was signed providing for cultural exchanges in the fields of art, theater, sports, film, architecture, music, law, journalism, medicine, museums, radio and television. Travel to each country will be encouraged by the other. Each country agrees to send 10 individual performers and 10 major performing arts groups to the other on visits.

The United States and the Soviet Union had cultural exchange agreements from 1958 until 1979. These were allowed to lapse as a result of American anger over the Soviet use of troops in Afghanistan. Since then, there have been some exchanges of performers and others but each case has been handled on its own by the two governments.

PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE

Similar to the general exchanges agreement, this would provide exchanges of professors and students and would encourage the teaching of Russian in American schools and of English in Soviet schools. In addition, the agreement provides for joint cancer research, joint development of education computer programs and increased television coverage by each country of sports events in the other.

NEW CONSULATES

The two governments agreed to open new consulates in Kiev and New York. The Soviet Union said, however, that this will not take effect until negotiations are completed to allow the Soviet airline Aeroflot to fly to the United States. Aeroflot’s rights were suspended as part of American sanctions against the Soviet Union after the declaration of martial law in Poland.

It is possible that these rights will now be negotiated since the U.S. government has been insisting first on the signing of a North Pacific air safety agreement. This was done on the first day of the summit.

PACIFIC AIR SAFETY

This agreement, signed by the United States, the Soviet Union and Japan, is to prevent a recurrence of the tragic incident in which a Soviet plane shot down a Korean Air Lines 747 that had strayed over Soviet territory Sept. 1, 1983, killing all 269 people aboard.

The agreement provides for a new communication link between Anchorage, Alaska, and Khabarovsk in the Soviet Union for use whenever a civil aircraft is in trouble in the area. Under the agreement, the Soviet Union said it will inform Japan or the United States when an unidentified aircraft that could be lost flies over Soviet territory.

MAGNETIC FUSION

Reagan and Gorbachev agreed that their countries would join in encouraging international cooperation in the development of magnetic fusion. Fusion is a process in which hydrogen is heated to a temperature of millions of degrees, creating helium and releasing enormous energy.

Scientists say that the process, if developed, would provide the world in the 21st Century with a source of energy that could never be exhausted.