Memories of Moscow

Something grand happened in Moscow this week. Because of the powerful forces expressed by the memorable symbolic moments of the summit, the nuclear-arms race between the superpowers is not likely, we think, ever to be the same.

Some of those moments:

Who can forget President Reagan, standing before a bust of Lenin in full glower, delivering one of the more lyrical speeches of his presidency to an audience of Moscow State University students? “We may be allowed to hope that the marvelous sound of a new openness will keep rising through, ringing through, leading to a new world of reconciliation, friendship and peace,” he said.

A Communist general secretary grabbed both the right hand of the fiercely anti-Communist American President and the right fist of a small Soviet boy and guided them into a handshake.

Ronald Reagan stood in bright sunlight inside the Kremlin wall, arm around the shoulders of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, banishing his vision of the Soviet Union as an evil empire and letting a nation of what he called “warm and hospitable and friendly people” rush in to fill the void.

The arms race has survived bear hugs and detente and declarations of good intent for many decades. Each nation has its own interests, and those interests at many points are in conflict. The success of Gorbachev’s reforms is by no means assured.

But the summit dramatized the irrefutable fact that an arms race is the last thing that either nation needs or can afford.

Gorbachev must have a respite to rebuild his nation’s economy and reshape the way its politics and government function, lest it nod off into a twilight of second-rate power.

America, too, must spend more time modernizing industries and finding new products to compete in world markets, paying off its huge national debt, curtailing its appetite for drugs. Close attention to domestic problems might once have meant America’s going isolationist, but not in this decade or the next. The rest of the world is changing too fast for Americans to take their eyes off it. Europe is gathering itself into an even more powerful economic force. Japan already has done so. New liberties under communist governments portend change among the Soviet Union’s allies in Eastern Europe.

A few years ago, doing two things at once might have seemed more than the United States could handle, with the bitter political divisions on both social programs and foreign policy. In recent months, a consensus has begun to form concerning domestic programs. In Moscow, Reagan took a long step along a path toward similar consensus on foreign matters.

Asked at his last press conference whether he and Gorbachev could sign an agreement to scrap half their intercontinental nuclear weapons before he leaves office in January, the President said he hoped so. But, he said, “If these negotiations are still going on, I will do everything I can to persuade my successor to follow up.” It has been a long time since an outgoing President has made an offer that promised that sort of continuity between Administrations on anything as important as superpower relations. It may well prove to be the most significant of the memorable moments in Moscow.