Thin Gruel

President Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev started the new year on speaking terms.

Their earnest exchange of good intentions was a profound improvement over last year’s holiday season. But the terms in which both spoke of U.S. and Soviet research on defense systems left arms-control talks as tightly deadlocked as they were long before the summit meeting in November.

The words peace and hope were sprinkled through the brief addresses that both leaders delivered on television to people of the other’s country on New Year’s Day--Gorbachev having a 9-6 edge on the use of peace or peaceful , the President a 5-3 edge on hope .

Both referred to 1986 as the year of peace--Gorbachev saying that it had been “declared” such a year, without making it clear by whom, and Reagan saying that they should work to make it such a year.

Moscow correspondents said that residents of that city found Reagan--whom they watched on their prime-time evening news--a nice enough man, serious about peace. Because Gorbachev was sandwiched at odd hours among parades and football games, it is harder to know how Americans reacted to the oddity of a Russian on television who was not peddling low-calorie beer.

Beyond the platitudes, Reagan talked of human rights, Gorbachev did not. Both wished for less suspicion and more trust. Neither mentioned the fact that by the time they spoke the SALT II arms-control treaty had expired, along with the Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing. You obviously can’t cover everything in 700 or 800 words, no matter how well-chosen or well-meaning.

But on “Star Wars,” the strategic defense program that lies like a boulder on a freeway in the path of arms-control talks, there was no change. Reagan defended Star Wars, although not by name, and Gorbachev condemned it, obliquely. So, despite the novelty of it all, the exchange was thin gruel for a world in which each superpower has 10,000 or more warheads with the other’s name on them.

The next clue to what each leader really has in mind will come at Geneva, where U. S. and Soviet negotiators will meet again on Jan. 16, with the American delegation under instructions from the President to accelerate the process.

The process cannot budge, let alone accelerate, until both sides come to grips with the fact that neither side will cut missile forces until there is mutual agreement on how far and in what direction defense planning is likely to go. In a letter to Reagan just before the Geneva summit meeting, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, perhaps unintentionally, put his finger directly on the problem. Discussing signs that the Soviets are capable of regional defense systems, he wrote: “Even a probable territorial defense would require us to increase the number of our offensive forces and their ability to penetrate Soviet defenses to assure that our operational plans could be executed.” It is irrational to expect Soviet strategists to think differently about Star Wars.

The President continues to insist on telling Americans that the research will lead to a vast shield over the United States that will make nuclear missiles obsolete. But even Weinberger, who once outdid the President in promising the nation nuclear immunity, no longer pretends that this is the case. He was offered a chance in Senate hearings late last year to say that the program would eliminate the threat of destruction. He chose instead to say that it would reduce the threat. “Reduction” of the threat is not what Americans who would foot a bill of perhaps $1 trillion for Star Wars think they would be buying.

It may be that in a few generations technology will advance to the point where defenses against missiles will be possible. That point is not in sight, and sooner or later someone has to be as candid with Reagan on the matter as a White House aide was with Times writer Robert Scheer in a recent discussion of Star Wars research.

No device that has been tested for Star Wars has worked the way its promoters told the American public that it did. And, when asked to discuss a scheme to stack seven layers of defense over the United States, the aide said: “We still don’t have a single workable weapon that will shoot down a single uncooperative missile. So what good is it to talk about seven layers of weapons that don’t exist and maybe never will?”

The President can hardly be blamed for yearning for an easier way out of the nuclear dilemma than what he now has--an uneasy assurance that the Soviets will not launch missiles at the United States because they would be blown away in return. He must make do with what he has. And what he has is a chance to reduce missile forces on both sides by negotiating the terms under which both countries will conduct defense research.