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were carefully worked out before the actual summit meeting so that they could be used as evidence of rapprochement does not detract from their usefulness. Especially valuable is the environmental research agreement, both for itself and for any weight it may have in helping convince the Kremlin to send delegates to the Stockholm international conference on environmental problems this summer.

Further evidence of Russian-American rapprochement is expected, perhaps this weekend, as the two superpowers move to final agreement on strategic arms limitation. Except for some not unsolvable details, mainly the question of locating offensive and defensive land missile bases, the two countries appear ready to limit defensive misile to 200 launchers for each side. A separate understanding would freeze the number of offensive missile systems, both landand submarine-based, to present levels.

But even as these carefully preorchestrated public demonstrations of accord are flashed out to the world by radio and television, Mr. Nixon and Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev are holding long secret sessions on how to achieve detente in other areas of global interest. Moscow would like to get U.S. approval of its long-sought European security conference. Mr. Nixon would like Soviet help in bringing North Vietnam around to letting the United States get out of Vietnam "with honor" and with its prisoner of war, and in defusing the Middle East.

The Vietnam situation, as of this writing, has come up only in a deliberately casual suggestion by Mr. Brezhnev that the United States return to the Paris peace talks with Hanoi. But beyond this the Kremlin has shown little desire to influence Hanoi to bow to Washington. Whatever points Mr. Nixon may have won toward persuading Mocow to intervene with Hanoi by his earlier Peking trip have been at least watered down by the bombing offensive and arms blockade against Hanoi. These acts have in fact driven Moscow toward Peking in the matter of shipping Soviet arms to Hanoi via China.

Thus the single most distressing issue on the international scene, the Vietnam war, remains the one least susceptible to resolution at the Moscow summit. Despite that, the businesslike and apparently determined effort by both sides to maximize the possible areas of agreement make the summit one of the most hopeful events of our recent deeply troubled times.

[From the Chicago Daily News, May 25, 1972]

THE BUSINESSLIKE SUMMIT

The agreements flowing from the Moscow summit continue to explain why it was not called off in spite of the escalated fighting in Vietnam. A great deal of spadework has obviously gone into this meeting of President Nixon and the Soviet leadership, not all of it apparent beforehand. On the record thus far, this appears to be summitry at its best, avoiding the pitfalls of earlier toplevel conferences where impulse and expediency led to later misunderstanding. As one Russian remarked to The Daily News' Peter Lisagor in Moscow, several agreements were "precooked," and their scope is impressive. The least controversial came first, as might be expected. Nobody can be in favor of disease and pollution, and the self-interest of the superpowers coincides in the fight against them. Even so, the agreement to exchange information and co-operate on health and the environment marks a considerable advance and raise hope that formidable problems can be more quickly solved by joint effort.

The agreement toward joint exploration of space is another gain. Work was already going forward on redesigning spacecraft so that U.S. and Russian ships might link up in orbit. The Moscow seal hastens the day when American and Russian spacemen will work side by side in orbit and perhaps on the

moon.

The big one-arms limitation-is still to come, but here too the long period of highly technical preparation seems about to pay off. And if the superpowers can make this work, a considerable degree of relaxation will be possible in international affairs.

There is still an unreal quality about this meeting in the Kremlin and the agreements coming forth like a string of sausages. No one dares to forget that while the American flag flies alongide the hammer and sickle over the Krem

lin walls, missiles are poised and ready that could obliterate most of the people of Russia and the United States. The image springs to mind of a Wild West poker game with guns at the ready, except that the stakes in this game are higher than mankind has ever known.

But for almost the first time, an element of trust seems to be present in the Soviet-American face-off. It's only a delicate seed so far, and a misstep could crush it. But the idea has at least been planted on both sides that on some things they have to trust each other or the world will surely blow apart. If that seed can be nurtured through co-operation in health, environment, trade and space exploration, perhaps it growth can smother the ruinous proliferation of weapons of death.

[From The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., April 10, 1972]

MOON TREATY WORK BEGINS

Geneva (UPI)-Legal experts began work today on a new space treaty which would ban use of the moon for military purposes.

Such a treaty was proposed by the Soviet Union at the last meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

The 28-nation legal subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, is drawing up the terms of the accord.

Most delegates were confident that agreement will be reached although they said the drafting of legal articles and later approval by the major committee and the General Assembly probably will take two to three years.

The object is to reserve the moon for peaceful uses and to prevent any attempts to turn it into a launching station for nuclear weapons.

Earlier agreements cover principle for the peaceful exploration of outer space, which came into force in 1967, and automatic return and rescue of astronauts and objects launched into space, which went into effect in 1968.

[From the Baltimore Sun, May 28, 1972]

THE MOSCOW AGREEMENTS, LIMITED

Some world events are obviously historic at the moment of their occurrence. With others, as with the Russo-American strategic arms limitation treaty, it is necessary to wait and see. If this should lead step by logical step to an actual slowing and then a cessation of the reckless nuclear-arms competition that threatens the planet, it will indeed have been historically memorable. Such are the expressed intentions of the signatories, and they seem at the moment to be good intentions, as the holding down of numerical levels of missiles should surely indicate.

Nevertheless, the treaty and its accompanying executive agreement are carefully circumscribed. Under the formal treaty, which requires Senate ratification, each country would be limited to the setting up of two defensive anti-ballistic missile systems, one for the protection of each capital city and one for the guarding of strategic sites of offensive missiles. The weapons at each site would be held to no more than 100. What it appears to come to, in simple terms, is that the capacity for "overkill," offensive and defensive, remains but is reduced somewhat a statement that might make little sense in any world but ours.

The agreements further leave both nations virtually free to increase the mass of their nuclear arsenals and to proceed with a continued "sophistication" of the weapons; a freedom which Defense Secretary Laird has already said the United States will explore to the fullest, as without question will also the Russians.

The nuclear-arms race, that is, can hardly be said even to be beginning to be over. Within the terms of these agreements the signatories can, if they choose, continue it and for that matter, in terms of destructive force and effectiveness, step it up.

The Moscow document should be taken, rather, as an acknowledgment of the cost and the perils of the course up until now, and of intent to try to increase the presently residual ingredient of rationality in world affairs. In that they deserve our welcome, even as history withholds any instantaneous applause.

[From the Washington Daily News, May 25, 1972]

Moscow: SO FAR, SO GOOD

It's too soon, of course, to throw one's hat in the air and cheer President Nixon's summitry as a resounding success. But he seems to be making good progress.

He appears to be getting on well with Communist party boss Leonid I. Brezhnev, which was not sure in advance, and is signing a series of useful agreements in Moscow.

The agreements already reached call for cooperation in fighting air and water pollution; co-ordinated research in the fields of cancer, heart disease and environmental health; scientific and technical exchanges, and the joint exploration of space, including a manned flight by Russian and American astronaut in 1975.

Admittedly, none of these agreements alone is earth-shaking. But, taken together, they point to a pattern of cooperation that, if it develops, would mean better Soviet-American relations.

We're intrigued by the plans for the docking of a Soviet and an American spacecraft and an exchange of crews.

This is a step toward taking the element of competition out of space flights which has increased these costs to both countries. And it presupposes a lack of serious tension between Moscow and Washington thru 1975.

Neither government would think of a joint space flight if it anticipated a screaming, rocket-rattling confrontation in the future.

Naturally, not expecting such a confrontation is no guarantee that one won't develop. But if the superpowers act as if they do not expect a showdown, a dangerous crunch is far less likely.

Still to come at the summit are agreements on limiting strategic arms, increasing Russo-American trade and taking the first step toward a mutual troop withdrawal in Central Europe.

These are genuinely important measures and, if they come thru without hitches, they'll confirm and strengthen the signs of easier relations that already have emerged from the Nixon visit.

We don't know, of course, what Mr. Nixon and Mr. Brezhnev are saying in private about those potential flashpoints of East-West war, Vietnam and the Middle East. Based on the favorable atmosphere in Moscow, it's possible to hope they will agree that those danger areas must not be permitted to lead to a Soviet-American conflict.

Such an understanding, if it's reached, would hardly be made public. Yet it would be the most significant of Mr. Nixon's accomplishment in Moscow. We hope and assume he is working hard to get it.

[From the Christian Science Monitor, Friday, May 26, 1972]

COMMITMENT TO PEACE...

Summer, 1975: three years from now, American and Soviet spaceships will link up in orbit around the earth.

That is a commitment to peace, to friendly relations in the years ahead on the part of the world's two superpowers.

The art of summitry is to produce results. Without concrete results, a summit meeting falls as flat as a pancake. But to achieve results the most careful preparatory work is essential.

The Nixon-Brezhnev meeting has knocked off agreements thick and fast. Months of patient work must have gone into their drafting. As the summit got into high gear in Moscow this week, we began to see why both sides wanted it so badly, and why neither side would let itself be diverted by the Vietnam

war.

Of the spate of technical and scientific agreements signed at the Kremlin Tuesday and Wednesday, the planned rendezvous in space between an American Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet Soyuz is the most spectacular.

It means that the Apollo program, which was to have been wound down with a final moon landing at the end of this year, will now be extended. The

United States has three earth-orbital Skylab missions scheduled for next year. After that there would have been a gap in manned space flights until the space shuttle is ready in 1978. The Apollo flight with the Soviet Union in 1975 will help bridge that gap. It will mean that key elements of the Apollo teams can be kept intact. It will mean an estimated 4,400 more jobs in the aerospace industry. It will mean that Soviet space crews will come to the United States for training and vice versa. And once the rendezvous is made televiewers in both countries will be able to watch their astronauts moving from one spacecraft to another and conducting joint scientific experiments.

True, implementation of the agreement will depend on the U.S. Congress voting new funds to keep the Apollo program going. But this surely Congress cannot fail to do in view of the significance that the joint space program has for the future.

We have always felt that the immense adventure of space exploration should not be subjected to national exclusivities or rivalries. The United States and the Soviet Union have a vast lead over other countries in the space field, but we look forward to the day when joint exploration of the universe will be a multi-national, indeed, a world enterprise. The American-Soviet agreement opens the door to that possibility.

... AND AN ISSUE THAT UNITES

The pact on the environment signed by Presidents Nixon of the United States and Podgorny of the Soviet Union recognizes that the superpowers' ultimate development hinges as much on making peace with their own habitat as on adjusting the military strength they control.

In this, as in the space pact, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. wanted something concrete to show as an earnest of good summit intentions. Yet it would be wrong to characterize the environmental agreement as in any sense mere window dressing. It is historic in its own right, regardless of the outcome on the more immediately nettling SALT and Vietnamese issues.

The pact is the first comprehensive agreement between major industrial powers on the environment. The U.S. has an agreement with Canada on the Great Lakes, an air pollution project going with Mexico, and so on. But these are limited in scope, not attempts to share knowledge, manpower, technology, and research on a systematic basis across the full range of environmental concerns: air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the preservation of countryside. True, the pact risks nothing on either side. Specific joint projects have yet to be agreed on. Such security issues as inspections or monitoring of rates of pollution within the other's borders are avoided. Results lie in the future.

Yet both nations can expect to gain and to learn from the other. The U.S. is ahead in many technologies, such as waterborne waste treatment, while the Russians have more experience with pipeline efforts in its vast Arctic territory.

The Soviet Union is deeply interested in how the U.S. administers its environmental efforts. The U.S.S.R. does not have a central unit comparable to the Environmental Protection Agency or the Council on Environmental Quality in the U.S. In such categories as industrial pollution, it leaves enforcement up to the various industries which have their own central planning board. In turn the ministries set standards for individual plant, making the plant manager personally responsible for meeting emissions or waste standards. The weaknesses in this system can be readily seen. When half a dozen industries are simultaneously dumping wastes into the Volga River the issue of responsibility gets blurred.

The Soviet Union has environmental problems uniquely of its own making. It may be something of a joke to Westerners that Soviet planners seem to do everything on a massive scale-massive factory programs, stupendous water diversion projects. But this habit of large scale now has many in that country deeply concerned. For example, they are asking how the diversion of Arctic waters to arid southern regions will affect their climate and weather. Their cities are just beginning to feel the impact of the automobile. There are now only 200,000 cars in Moscow for its seven million people. In five years there will be a million cars. What will happen to the city then?

These are kinds of problems the two superpowers share. The environmental pact signed this week sets the environment apart as a cooperative, not compet

itive issue. It recognizes that industrial might and the multiplying of urban culture, if undisciplined, would devastate the two powers' habitats as surely as undisciplined nuclear weaponry.

[From the Boston Globe, May 27, 1972]

THE BEGINNING OF SANITY

After a quarter of a century of accelerating and fully justified anxiety, the nuclear treaty negotiated by President Nixon and Soviet leaders at the Moscow summit gives the world a chance to breathe a little easier.

The treaty may be attacked from two sides, both in the Senate when it comes up for ratification and on the hustings this fall, one side denigrating it for what it does not do and the other saying that any slightest concession to the Communists is too much.

Realists, however, will applaud it as a step in the right direction at the very least, a platform on which larger agreements can be erected in the future after both nations have learned how confortably they can live with this one. An agreement of any kind has to be put down as a triumph for all men everywhere, for it has been clear to many from the beginning not only that a rapidly arming United States and a rapidly arming Russia were threatened with bankruptcy, but, infintely worse, that their distruct of each other and their mad race for larger and larger stockpiles of nuclear weapons almost inevitably would put them on a collision course. Expenditures, of course, do not nearly measure the potential for disaster that was abuilding. It is noteworthy, however, that the US has spent $25 billion on strategic weapons sytems in just the last three years. And though it will of course be argued that it was this which guaranteed us some semblance of security in that time, speculation also is in order on what such a sum might have contributed to the solution of pressing domestic problems.

The agreement on anti-ballistic missile launchers (ABM in the US, the Galosh system in Russia) is a standoff, with both nations limited to 300, two sites in the US and two in Russia. This will be accepted as fair and workable. There may be some criticism of the agreement freezing land and sea-based offensive missiles at their present levels. One criticism would be that the accord is another Executive Agreement not requiring Senate confirmation, as does the treaty. There may be some validity to the criticism on this ground, for the Senate understandably argues that its advice and consent should not be disallowed, and there is some question as to the constitutional legitimacy of substituting such agreements for treaties.

The criticism that the Russians have the better of the bargain in some categories, however, omits that the US, for whatever it means in any event, has the better of it in other categories. In land-based offensive missiles, the Russians have the edge, 1500 to 1054. But in submarine-based, the US has the edge, 656 to 500. Who is to say where superiority lies?

A possible defect in the Executive Agreement lies in the accord allowing the replacement of missiles when newer types are developed. As Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has argued in support of his proposal for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CBT), more testing is almost certain to result in developments which could upset the basic parity on which Washington and Moscow now at long last have agreed:

"It surely makes little difference whether we or they discover technological innovation first. Once known, the information inevitably will spread to the other side. And so even our own success might well threaten our security by offering the Soviet Union a new model to copy."

This does indeed seem to be so. The record of what has been accomplished so far, however, suggests hope, and certainly not despair. Little by little, the superpowers over the years, berating each other at almost every step, have moved closer and closer to the realization that they will have to live with each other or not at all.

In 1963, there was the Partial Test Ban Treaty. In 1968, the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Neither of these demanded the on-site inspection which so far has blocked even consideration of CBT. But this objection is nullified now by the super-sophisticated off-site inspection techniques that have been developed.

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