Hope and Hurdles

After maneuvering for months behind a smoke screen of acrimony, the United States and the Soviet Union have suddenly burst into the clear, each waving what seem to be sensible and achievable proposals for major limitations on arms and armies.

President Reagan, who some weeks ago talked of tearing up the only treaty that put a ceiling on intercontinental nuclear missiles, stood before the United Nations yesterday to proclaim hope for much broader agreements.

There is movement, as he put it, on reductions in long-range missiles and on even sharper cuts in short-range nuclear weapons in Europe. In a separate announcement, representatives of the East and West agreed to new rules under which they would keep track of each other’s ground forces in Europe.

According to the White House, Reagan went back over the draft of his speech Friday after a second letter from Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev was delivered to Washington to make sure that the tone was not “nasty.”

But with the hope came hurdles. The President stood by his proposal for extending the 1972 ABM missile-defense treaty for only half as long as the Soviets want it extended during the years of remaining research on his space-based “Star Wars” defense system. There was no movement there.

And there is the “pall” that Reagan said has been cast over U.S. relations with the Soviets by the arrest and detention of American journalist, Nicholas Daniloff. The Soviets have charged Daniloff with espionage, presumably in retaliation for the American arrest for spying of Gennady F. Zakharov, a Soviet physicist who had been working out of the United Nations in New York. Reagan reiterated the American position that Daniloff was arrested and jailed on trumped-up charges “in a callous disregard of due process and numerous human rights conventions.”

Yet with that hurdle came some small hope--nothing tangible, nothing in writing, and nothing to break the silence with which the Soviet delegation greeted the President’s speech. Instead of going on, as he once might have, to call Moscow an evil empire, the President concluded simply, “The world expects better.” And when he was asked later to comment on the Daniloff case, the President declined, saying, “Everything’s too delicate.”

Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze spent as much time in meetings over the weekend as most people spend in their offices on workdays. Surely Shultz spent at least some of that time making it clear in ways that are not always effective in formal, public statements, that the Daniloff arrest was a big mistake. Shultz could be very effective explaining the difference between prying and spying, having asked more than once asked enterprising journalists who turn up material that Washington would rather hide which side they were on. It has been extensively reported in the American press that Washington officials themselves underestimated the Soviet reaction to the arrest of Zakharov and, if they had it to do over again, might handle it differently.

The “pall” of which the President spoke yesterday has more than one meaning--it can be a cover for a coffin or a less specifically foreboding aura of gloom. There are indications that both parties are thinking more in the second sense than in the first.

A Soviet spokesman says there are “several ideas in the air” for removing the pall, all of which we assume would leave Daniloff with his honor as a journalist intact. That may seem like a tall order. But then so did movement on arms control just a few months ago.