5-Day Summit Opens May 30 : Gorbachev Will Visit Washington

President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will hold a five-day summit in the United States starting May 30, the two superpowers announced today as top-level negotiations resumed on arms control treaties.

“I’m looking forward to meeting with him,” Bush told reporters a few hours after the formal announcement was made. “It is very important that we have these conversations.”

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater told reporters that the summit will be a “tough love” session that will deal with the breakaway Soviet republic of Lithuania and perhaps result in agreements on arms control issues, including a pact limiting long-range strategic nuclear weapons.

He also said it was hoped an agreement could be reached on conventional troop levels in Europe, and added that U.S.-Soviet trade would be on the agenda.

In Moscow, a Foreign Ministry official intimated today that rapid developments in the Soviet Union may have led Gorbachev to seek an earlier than expected summit in Washington. Observers had predicted that the summit would be held in late June.

“The pace of our life is accelerating,” Kiril Kasatkin said. “Life itself put forward new questions and they need new answers.”

The simultaneous announcements of the summit came from the White House and the Soviet news agency Tass as Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze held their second day of meetings.

Bush said the conversations between Baker and the Soviet diplomat are “going reasonably well.” The President is scheduled to meet with Shevardnadze at the White House on Friday.

Shevardnadze summed up his first two rounds of talks with Baker, saying, “I think it’s going rather well.”

As the morning session ended, Shevardnadze said he and Baker had discussed “the entire range of arms control issues” as well as “practical preparations for the summit.”

The details of the summit were sketchy. Fitzwater offered little information or specific locations and indicated that the summit may not even last five days.

“It could turn out to be a two- or three-day summit, depending on travel schedules,” Fitzwater suggested. Bush had been expected to deliver a commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., on May 31, and there has been talk that Gorbachev might make a similar speech at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

The spokesman said that the crisis in Lithuania will “undoubtedly be an issue” at the summit and that the President intends to raise it. “If anything, Lithuania makes the summit even more important,” Fitzwater said.

“I would characterize this summit more in terms of demonstrating the kind of tough love working relationship that we were able to develop with the Soviet Union by virtue of four or five summits,” the spokesman said.

Lithuania aside, Bush and Gorbachev have planned the summit to discuss three major arms control agreements dealing with long-range nuclear missiles, chemical arms and troops and weapons in Europe.