dace hh Rast | le qi , Zon OR cc danger. 3 what's at stake. Just days before the 1960 Paris Summit meeting between Soviet leader Khrushchev and U.S. president Eisenhower, an American U-2 Spy plane was shot down as it flew directly across the USSR. With it went the summit hopes of 25 years ago. Today the Reagan administration, in preparation for the November 19 Geneva talks with Soviet leader Gorbachev, has pulled out all stops to “‘redefine’’ the agenda and has placed the outomce of the summit in With only weeks remaining before the two world leaders meet, and with the issues facing them so vitally urgent for all humankind, there may be still an opportunity to reverse this direction. So important are these issues, so clear are the choices facing both the summit talks themselves and the world, it is vital that clarity prevail on _ Just what is each side proposing be discussed? What are the expecta- tions for Geneva being expressed in Moscow and Washington? What exactly is each side doing in the days leading up to the summit? —... Two Agenda Views ee In his extensive interview with Ime magazine Aug. 28, Gor- bachev could not have been Clearer about Soviet summit alms: “*I can assure you we are Seriously preparing for Geneva. € attach immense importance to it and are pinning serious hopes On it,” he said. ‘T think it is an immutable fact that whether we like each other or Not, we can either survive or Perish together. The principle question we must answer is Whether we are at last ready to T€cognize that there is no other ae but to live in peace with each €r and whether we are pre- oo to switch our mentality and ; ee of behavior from a war- live .., 1 peaceful track. You call it © and let live; we call it peaceful ©0-existence ... If there is no ban on the militarization of space, if an arms race in space is not prevented, there will be nothing at all... We are prepared to conduct talks — but not on space weapons, not on what specific types of such weapons will be deployed in space. We are prepared to con- duct talks on preventing an arms. race in space.” game AE The U.S. has sent quite diffe- rent pre-summit messages. While President Reagan himself has not said much directly on the summit since he issued a call for one last spring, his insistence that SDI (Star Wars) was non-negotiable set a tone far different than Mos- cow’s. : It was left to other key voices in the U.S. administration to “‘re- define’? Geneva’s agenda. On August 19, National Security Ad- viser Robert McFarlane warned the summit ‘‘should not become an excuse for not thinking about what is at the heart of our dis- agreements’. He called the Soviet leader Gorbachev meets U.S. president Reagan in Geneva Nov. 19. What will be the outcome? USSR’s negotiating stance ‘‘one-sided’’ referring specifically to Gorbachev’s Star Wars position. White House spokesman Larry Speakes, downplaying any hopes for serious arms control talks, gave. this scenario: ‘“‘The im- portant thing is to get to this meet- ing, to have the two men look each other over (and) lay out their views on various topics and then be able to set an agenda to deal with these in the future.” Former president Nixon’s con- tribution to the summit agenda was an article in Foreign Affairs urging the meeting not deal with arms control but with U.S.-USSR ‘flash points’? around regional disputes. Words and Deeds: A comparison But, one might argue, both Gorbachev and Reagan have publicly expressed a desire for a successful summit; both Wash- ington and Moscow have spoken about the dangers facing human- kind and the need to scale down tensions. In his Time interview Gor- bachev emphasized a key ingre- dient for summit talks — ‘‘Every- one would probably agree,’’ he said, ‘‘that the political atmo- sphere for talks is shaped well in advance ... today’s actions will largely determine the scenario for our November discussions.” What, then, has each side done to prepare the ‘“‘scenario’’ for November? e The USSR responded to Reagan’s idea for a summit in early spring with an initial step. In GENEVA SUMMIT 1985 April, 1985 it unilaterally declared a moratorium on the further deployment of SS-20 missiles targetted on Europe. It said: it would agree to a zero option on the correlation of medium-range missiles in Europe with the U.S., leaving in place only as many mis- siles as Britain and France have aimed at the USSR. The U.S. response was negative. The U.S.-NATO program to sta- tion Pershing-2 and Cruise missiles in western Europe would proceed; French-British missiles would not be included in negotiations. e On August 6 (40th anni- versary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima) the USSR announced a unilateral moratorium on nu- clear tests until January, 1986. It said its ban would be extended even further if the U.S. would join, and Moscow invited the U.S. to resume talks on a com- plete nuclear test ban agreement. Washington’s response was swift. Despite clear figures that the U.S. was well ahead in nuclear tests (1954-1984: USSR conducted 556 nuclear tests, USA 756) it re- jected the Soviet offer as ‘‘Propa- ganda’’. And, tomakeits point pain- fully clear, an American nuclear test took place Aug. 17 in Nevada. Even more ominous signals were sent. On Sept. 13 the U.S. carried out the first of 15 anti-satellite (ASAT) tests when an air-launched missile brought down an obsolete U.S. space satellite — one of the first shots of Reagan’s multi-billion dollar Star Wars program. This hostile, pre-summit act was car- ried through despite Soviet warn- ings nine days earlier that the ASAT test meant the USSR ‘“‘will consider itself free of its unilateral commitment not to place anti- satellite weapons in space.’’ The Sept. 13 ASAT test also came just days before a Soviet- sponsored resolution on the peaceful, non-military use of outer space was placed before the 40th session of the United Na- tions General Assembly. “In our view,’’ Gorbachev told Time editors; “‘SDI is the first stage of a project to develop anew Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) sys- tem which is prohibited under the 1972 ABM treaty.’ He pointed out that the estimated cost of $70-billion (with $26-billion al- ready approved) is four times the cost of the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb, and double the Apollo pro- gram which paid for NASA’s space exploration for an entire decade. ‘That (SDI) is far from being a pure research program,” Gor- bachev said, “‘is also confirmed by other facts including the (ASAT) tests scheduled for a space strike weapons’ system’. Cooperation? Confrontation? On the eve of Geneva, the first summit in six years, two clear- - cut, divergent agendas are being projected. While the world teeters on the brink of entering a new era of terror by bringing nuclear strike capability to space and of developing a new family of weapons on earth, Moscow and Washington have set out their aims, both in words and in ac- tions. — Tom Morris 7”, ss PACIFIC TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 2, 1985 e 7 i