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Soviet-American relations—as seen from the Kremlin

As Leonid Brezhnev's cordial meeting with Senator Charles Percy indicated, the Kremlin leaders want to appear willing to improve Soviet-American relations, despite the hard-line rhetoric by President-elect Reagan and his advisers. For political and economic reasons, they would generally like to restore détente—on their terms. But their conciliatory tone also has a propaganda motive: if relations worsen once Reagan enters office, the Kremlin wants to be in the best possible position to blame the U.S. Amplifying the signal Moscow has been sending Reagan, Brezhnev's chief spokesman, Leonid Zamyatin, last week released exclusively to TIME an official statement reviewing the relationship between the superpowers as seen from Red Square:

Experience shows that among nuclear powers it is the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. that share the main responsibility for the development of events in the world. They possess the major arms potential, and therefore the levers of influence on world development are in their hands. This is not a hegemonism of some nations over others. But the truth must be faced squarely that it is with the active participation of the Soviet Union and the U.S. that a number of treaties and agreements have in the past few decades been signed that restrain the proliferation of nuclear weapons, ban hostile changes in the environment and outlaw bacteriological arms.

We have agreed with the U.S. to avert an accidental outbreak of a nuclear war; we also signed with it a treaty on limiting strategic offensive weapons, which is called SALT I, and in June 1979, after almost seven years of work, a second treaty of the same type. Along with quantitative, this treaty sets qualitative limits to the effort of the sides in the military sphere. The system of SALT treaties has brought the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. to a point beyond which real disarmament, the actual reduction of military confrontation levels, begins.

If we ask what the cause is of the current situation and why much that gave both sides definite mutual advantages—political, as well as trade and economic—was disrupted, the answer should not be sought in Moscow. American policy has had its zigzags in the past, but in the past few years the U.S. leadership has in general taken a course hostile to the interests of detente, toward the arms race.

After the signing of the SALT II treaty, the U.S.A., instead of cutting down the American nuclear potential, say, in

Europe, began to build it up. This is being done in both quantitative and qualitative terms, which is a departure from the policy of reaching arms limitation agreements. Does this not harm the policy of détente?

Today all attempts to achieve military superiority are doomed. We may surpass each other in the production of a specific type of arms, but when we speak of the approximate parity of forces, both in your country and ours, we consider the totality of all the weapons that the Soviet Union, the U.S. and their allies possess.