That’s Good--but Here’s One Better : With each raise, the world gets safer

Washington and Moscow are handing back and forth spellbinding new pages of history these days.

A vigorous new competition in nuclear warheads has sprung up between the United States and the Soviet Union-- but this time to get rid of them, not to build more.

As in the grim Cold War days, the leaders of the two nations are talking as much to the rest of the world as to each other, and the details of their offers do not always match.

COMMON GOALS: But the thrust is right, and both sides agree privately that there’s lots of room for compromise.

President Bush had sought to avoid the prolonged haggling of formal negotiations when he announced drastic cuts in tactical weapons, hoping Moscow would follow his lead. But with an American delegation already in Moscow for exploratory talks, he should be trying hard to strike a bargain while the general mood is so affable, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev sets nuclear policy and it is still clear whom to negotiate with.

Bush started the wondrous exchanges with his announcement of just over a week ago that he was ordering all short-range nuclear missiles and artillery shells out of Europe. He hoped the Soviets would match such cuts to avoid losing what he called a “historic opportunity.”

That request was in fact a favor to Gorbachev. Since the failed coup of August, Soviet leaders have been restive about warheads stored around the country, despite assurances that the small tactical weapons are stored under tight control.

Bush also ordered strategic bombers and some missile silo crews to stand down from full alert. Nuclear cruise missiles will come off U.S. ships and submarines and work will stop on a mobile MX missile.

Destroying all land-based intercontinental missiles with more than one warhead did not strike Moscow as a favor. Most multi-warhead U.S. missiles are in submarines, not on land. Most such Soviet missiles are on land.

Gorbachev responded Saturday, matching the cuts in tactical weapons, adding a unilateral reduction in long-range missiles of 1,000 below what the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) treaty entitles him to and making three offers of his own.

He proposed leaving just 3,000 strategic warheads in each country, and he ignored the discomforting Bush proposal on land-based missiles.

Gorbachev announced a one-year moratorium on Soviet tests of nuclear warheads, calling on the United States to agree to a joint permanent test ban and repeated the Soviet pledge against first-use of nuclear weapons.

RARE OPPORTUNITY: These have both been non-starters in Washington for some time. Still, this one week of point and counterpoint will produce major reductions in both warheads and tensions with no bargaining at all. And the ideas that do not unilaterally lead to immediate action to reduce warheads will still leave arms control teams a great deal worth talking about. It was a week of what many American and Soviet citizens would happily call their kind of arms race.