Rights Charges Precede Vienna A-Arms Session

The United States and the Soviet Union traded charges of human rights violations today and then resumed their deliberations on cutting back superpower nuclear arsenals.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, speaking at a 35-nation East-West conference, said that “a tragic human rights situation” exists in the Soviet Union and among its Eastern allies. He warned that arms control would falter unless the perceived abuses were corrected.

“Arms control cannot exist as a process in isolation from other sources of tension in East-West relations,” Shultz said in a stern speech.

He addressed foreign ministers reviewing the 1975 Helsinki agreement’s promise of a freer exchange of people and ideas across the East-West divide.

Unfinished Business

After the speech, in which he offered no new Western initiatives, Shultz took up the unfinished business of the Iceland superpower summit with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna.

The two shook hands and sat down, alone except for translators, in the office of U.S. Ambassador Ronald Lauder.

Shevardnadze, preceding Shultz in addressing the conference, sprinkled his speech with renewed overtures to the West to eliminate chemical weapons and to conduct new talks between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact on reducing ground forces in Europe.

‘Systematic’ Violations

The Soviet foreign minister lashed out at the United States, where he said “violations of human rights are of a systematic and massive nature.”

He pointed to unemployment, the plight of the homeless, and what he said was a lack of free social benefits and education.

On arms control, he insisted that Reagan had agreed with Gorbachev that the two sides should strive for the elimination of all nuclear weapons within 10 years.

Reagan and his advisers dispute this interpretation of the Reykjavik talks. They say that while the President may have referred to a total nuclear weapons ban, he stressed that the U.S. position was to scrap only ballistic missiles within 10 years.