Summit Ends With Smiles, Hugs and a Signed Treaty : Progress on Next Pact Cited

Amid smiles and hugs, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev wound up their fourth summit today by putting into force the historic INF treaty, heralded as opening a new “era of nuclear disarmament,” and boasting of steady, if undramatic, improvement in superpower relations.

The Soviet general secretary called their meetings “a blow to the foundations of the Cold War.”

In a showy finish to a summit that held little drama, the two leaders signed the formal documents that bind the two nations to the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first to eliminate an entire class of nuclear missiles.

Destroy 2,500 Missiles

During the next three years, the two countries will be required to destroy more than 2,500 missiles, all land-based systems with ranges of 300 to 3,400 miles, prompting Gorbachev to declare, “The era of nuclear disarmament has begun.”

Standing with Reagan in ornate St. Vladimir Hall of the Kremlin, Gorbachev proclaimed: “The first lines have already been written into the book of a world without wars, violence or nuclear weapons. I believe that no one can now close that book and put it aside.”

At the same time, the two sides were able to report a degree of progress on technical aspects of a far more ambitious cut in strategic nuclear arsenals and vowed a push to conclude a treaty before Reagan leaves office in January.

“We must not stop here, Mr. General Secretary,” Reagan said. “There is much more to be done.”

After four days of talks, Reagan and Gorbachev hailed the summit as “an important step in the process of putting U.S.-Soviet relations on a more productive and sustainable basis,” satisfied with their ability to confront differences through “frank dialogue.”

Back-to-Back Conferences

The human rights issue took an odd turn in back-to-back news conferences that followed the final summit talks.

Gorbachev said he was “not filled with admiration at this aspect of the visit,” referring to Reagan’s meeting in Moscow with Soviet dissidents and refuseniks.

Reagan took pains not to criticize Gorbachev when the issue was raised by reporters.

Instead, he suggested for the second time in as many days that the problems Jews and others are having emigrating from the Soviet Union might be due more to bureaucratic snags that a suppression of human rights by the Kremlin.

“In any government, some of us do find ourselves bound in by bureaucracy,” Reagan said, “and then sometimes you have to stomp your foot and say unmistakably, ‘I want it done.’ And maybe you get through with it.”

Referring to Gorbachev, he said, “I have great confidence in his ability to do that.”

Gorbachev complained that because of U.S. resistance on the issue of conventional force reductions, “we’ve missed a good chance to impart some good dynamics” to East-West relations.

“We do make some important statements,” he said, “but they could be more serious. They could bear more weight.”

Gorbachev, however, shrugged off any disappointment with how the summit ended.

‘Art of the Possible’

“There’s nothing we can do about that,” he said. “Politics is the art of the possible, after all.”

Reagan refused to rule out the possibility of a fifth summit before leaving office in eight months.

“Something else might come up that necessitates our getting together and settling something other than that particular treaty,” Reagan said, referring to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty being negotiated by the United States and Soviet Union.

In his meeting with reporters, Gorbachev took great satisfaction in the President’s disavowal of his 1983 description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”

“Somebody asked the President whether he still considered the Soviet Union to be an ‘evil empire.’ He said no, and he said that within the walls of the Kremlin, next to the czar’s gate, right in the heart of that evil empire. We take note of that,” he said. “As the ancient Greeks say, ‘Everything flows; everything changes.’ ”

The President and First Lady joined the Gorbachevs this evening at the Bolshoi Ballet and for a cozy dacha dinner. They leave Moscow Thursday morning, after a formal farewell. They were to fly to London for an overnight stop before returning to Washington late Friday.

‘Star Wars’ Impasse

The deliberations on arms control left the prospects for a strategic arms treaty still deadlocked over U.S. opposition to limits on sea-launched cruise missiles and the all-too-familiar impasse over Reagan’s “Star Wars” space-based missile defense program.

Minor strides on other Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty issues paled in comparison to the difficulties that remain in working sea-launched cruise missiles and “Star Wars” into the equation.

Gorbachev accused Reagan of simply wanting to exploit a U.S. technological edge in resisting limits on the sea-launched missiles, which the United States considers unverifiable without having Soviet inspectors swarming over U.S. warships and naval bases.

Gorbachev’s renewed call for “strict observance” of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signaled no apparent retreat from earlier efforts to use the ABM pact to inhibit “Star Wars” testing and hold the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty treaty hostage to U.S. concessions.

If the summit did not fulfill the hopes of the principals, it did fulfill their needs.

White House officials had hoped for, and achieved, a trouble-free, telegenic summit to strengthen Reagan in the final months of his presidency and cement his role in history as a builder of better relations with the Soviet Union, despite his fierce anti-Communist political background.

Gorbachev sought demonstrable signs of more stable and secure relations with the United States to avoid having foreign policy concerns intrude on his self-styled “grandiose” plan for economic and political reforms at home.

The movement in arms control came in the difficult task of establishing counting and verification rules for air-launched cruise missiles and mobile land-based missiles.

Teams of experts worked at length during the summit to sketch the broad outlines of agreements in both areas but emphasized afterward that considerable detail work remains to be done at the arms talks in Geneva.