Pact or Not, Soviets Expect 1988 Summit

A Foreign Ministry spokesman said Tuesday that his government expects President Reagan to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Moscow regardless of whether there is an accord on reducing strategic weapons.

The spokesman, Boris D. Pyadyshev, was asked if a date for a presidential visit had been set, and he replied: “Would you be satisfied with, let us say, May or June?”

At the ministry’s first regular news conference since the two superpower leaders met earlier this month in Washington, Pyadyshev was asked whether there could be a summit meeting in Moscow without agreement having been reached on reducing strategic, or intercontinental, missiles.

“Our great wish,” he replied, “is that we have that treaty ready by the time President Reagan comes here on his visit. But we have a realistic view of the situation and we now have even deeper insight into U.S. internal developments and the lineup of forces on the American political scene covering arms control issues.”

Notable Progress Seen

While Gorbachev was in Washington, he and Reagan agreed on a set of outlines for their respective teams negotiating a 50% reduction in the number of strategic missiles in the U.S. and Soviet arsenals. Pyadyshev said he thinks U.S. and Soviet arms negotiators in Geneva will make significant progress toward this goal before the two leaders meet again.

Pyadyshev also reiterated his government’s position that the Reagan-Gorbachev accord rules out any broad interpretation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. The narrow interpretation would bar testing of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative program of space-based missile defenses outside the laboratory. President Reagan said in Washington on Tuesday that there was no agreement at last week’s summit on whether the narrow or a wider interpretation of the treaty should prevail.

Pyadyshev insisted, however, that the statement issued by the two leaders after their meetings in Washington indicated that while both are free to conduct research and testing under the ABM treaty, “the two sides have recognized that the ABM treaty must be enforced in the form in which it was signed in 1972, and not in the way it is currently being interpreted in the broad sense by some American interpreters of the treaty.”

He also said it seems that two senior West German officials are in the embarrassing position of having to pay off on bets involving the Soviet-American treaty, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in Washington, that calls for the elimination of medium-range missiles.

Defense Minister Manfred Woerner, Pyadyshev recalled, told the West German legislature four years ago that he would “crawl to Bonn” from his constituency if such missiles were actually eliminated.

Pyadyshev estimated the distance involved at 250 miles and noted that the Greens, the West German environmentalist party, had sent Woerner a set of heavy knee pads.