The Washington Summit : Soviets Call Pact ‘Best Gift’ for World

“It is the best imaginable Christmas and New Year’s gift for the world,” Yuri A. Gremitsky, a spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry, said Thursday of the missile treaty signed Tuesday in Washington.

“It enables us to see the future with optimism,” Gremitsky said, and optimism appeared to be the order of the day in Moscow.

Pravda, the Communist Party daily, described the treaty, which calls for the elimination of all the two superpowers’ ground-launched intermediate-range missiles, as “a major achievement made possible by Soviet new thinking.”

“It is hard to overestimate the significance of the first real step along the road to the annihilation of nuclear arsenals,” Pravda said.

The government daily Izvestia said the treaty represents “a success for today and an example for the future.”

Lev Tolkunov, chairman of the Council of the Supreme Soviet, said the treaty “makes it possible to speak about the creation of the preconditions for a secure world--a world without wars and violence.”

Pravda and Izvestia both predicted that the treaty will be ratified by the U.S. Senate.

“Judging from the first outcries, the majority of senators assess the document positively,” Pravda said. Izvestia said that “according to various forecasts, about 10 to 25 senators will risk openly coming out against the agreement, which enjoys the support of four out of five Americans.”

Soviet television, as it has from the outset of the three-day summit, concentrated on the pomp and ceremony surrounding events in Washington. It showed scenes from the dinner Wednesday honoring President Reagan at the Soviet Embassy and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s exchanges with congressional leaders and a group of American businessmen.

The nightly television news program “Vremya” offered a live telecast of Gorbachev’s departure from the White House, with translations of Gorbachev’s and Reagan’s remarks.

Tass, the Soviet news agency, carried reaction to the treaty signing from around the world, including East Germany. It quoted Erich Honecker, the East German leader, as calling the treaty “an historic landmark on the way to a world free from nuclear weapons.”

Honecker said he is more than happy about the prospect of losing many of the Soviet missiles based in his country.

“We have never disguised that the stationing of additional nuclear weapons in East and West brought us no joy,” he said. “All the more reason for us to thank and recognize all those who have reached this agreement with a sense of reality and a readiness to compromise in long and often complicated negotiations.”