It’s Another (Yawn) Historic Arms Treaty for Leaders

Tomorrow’s schoolchildren who have to learn this historic date will be relieved to know that august leaders yawned, doodled and joked while the world’s most far-reaching disarmament treaty was signed today.

President Bush lounged back in his gilt chair, drawing a series of horizontal lines on his note pad with his left hand. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev chuckled at a whispered joke from French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas.

Naked cherubs in a carved and painted ceiling gazed down at the ceremony through the blaze of glittering chandeliers to the marble columns and red velvet of the Elysee Palace, residence of French President Francois Mitterrand.

“It will take a little while, but it proves we are all here,” Mitterrand said as aides began passing the treaty declaration, bound in red leather, around the tables.

Actually, his first words were “Where’s my chair?”

Twenty-two leaders, representing NATO’s 16 states and the six Warsaw Pact allies, signed the document, which slashed Cold War arsenals, consigned mountains of weapons to the scrap heap and reversed the biggest arms buildup in history.

A further 12 leaders of neutral, nonaligned and European mini-states, all members of the 34-state Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, looked on.

They had arrived at the palace by the back door, a long slow convoy of official limousines gliding along graveled lanes into Mitterrand’s private park in the heart of Paris.

The captain of a presidential military honor guard raised his saber 33 times to his chin to salute the arriving guests.

Snipers guarded rooftops, and heavily armed SWAT-squad police in coal-black jumpsuits glared at crowds on the smart Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, by the front entrance.

“It is a great day, and a very grand occasion. It is the biggest treaty we’ve ever signed,” said a beaming senior aide to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher afterward. “I think the prime minister takes very great pride in it.”

Thatcher, dressed somberly in black and facing the outcome of the most serious challenge to her leadership at home, flashed pearl earrings and brave smiles at photographers.

U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, in the middle of a grueling diplomatic odyssey to bolster the American-led coalition in the Persian Gulf crisis, yawned twice behind his hand.

It all took less than 30 minutes, punctuated at the end by smiles and applause all round.

The text back in Mitterrand’s hands, he patted a blood-red leather box on the desk before him, the receptacle of the full 160-page document.

Handing it on to Foreign Minister Hans Van Den Broek of the Netherlands, official keepers of the milestone pact, Mitterrand told the gathering: “This treaty is in good hands.”