MOSCOW, Oct. 29—Four days before the start of the second round of United States‐Soviet negotiations on limiting strate gic weapons, diplomats here are puzzled over the harsh words passing between the two countries.
It is now a week since Presi dent Nixon and Foreign Minis ter Andrei A. Gro myko held a meet ing that American officials hoped would lead to a exchange of polemics. But it seems to many diplomats here that whatever the two leaders might have intended, the Rus sians are not quite ready to stop their verbal punching.
Georgi A. Zhukhov, a long time Pravda commentator, to day took almost half a page of invective to compare the Nixon Administration with the days when John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State and U‐2 high‐altitude reconnaisance air craft, not Beechcrafts, flew over Soviet territory. Mr. Zhukov was elaborating on the official state ment Monday in which the So viet Union said that the incur sion into Soviet Armenia by a twin‐engine Beechcraft plane carrying two American generals had been a hostile act, and then went on to assail United States policy around the world.
The United States has heard such arguments before, and by now bitter Soviet statements cause hardly a twinge of anxi ety among senior diplomats here and in Washington. And as today's State Department reply indicated, the United States can respond in kind, with just the correct sound of outrage. But the question that puz zles diplomats here is whether the harsh words of the Zhuk hovs and others mean any thing so far as the real issues before the two countries are concerned, or are simply So viet efforts to retaliate for what Soviet officials regard as Mr. Nixon's anti‐Soviet cam paign of September and most of this month.
The problem is more than a theoretical one. The United Nations is currently arguing over the Middle East crisis in public and in private. The complex talks between the Soviet Union and the United States on limitation of strate gic arms resume on Monday in Helsinki. The Big Four are talking about a new status for Berlin. If there is a desire by the big powers for agree ment in any or all of these fields, there could be a marked improvement in the interna tional climate.
If the angry polemics are just for outward effect, then that is one thing, but if they are meant as signals of deep differences, a period of pro longed tension could be ahead.
The straying Beechcraft, which has become the source of much of the friction in the last few days, is not in itself an important incident. The Russians probably have held on to the American generals longer than they normally night have because of the un paralleled material the incident provided for Soviet polemicists.
The United States warned that it would not tolerate Soviet naval base in Cuba. What should the Soviet Union say about the fact that Amer planes fly up and down its borders from bases in Turkey and elsewhere, the Russians here ask.
The generals were In a small, unarmed plane, they acknowl edge, but if the plane that strayed had been a nuclear bomber, who could say what the repercussions of an accident would have been?
When American diplomats read the Soviet note Monday they were struck by the empha sis laid on the dangers posed to Soviet security from forward American bases.
Moscow first raised this pos sibility at the first round of the talks in Helsinki last year, but remained ambiguous on the subject at the second round in Vienna last spring and summer. The Americans probably will not know until next week or the week after that whether the Russians will make an issue out of it—a matter that would ren der the prospects for an early agreement even more remote than they are now.
A hopeful sign, in the view of some diplomats, is that Mr. Zhukhov and other Soviet com mentators have not said any thing about the Helsinki talks. The United States has been under attack in every respect except that one.
Nowhere has the anger been more public than over the Mid dle East. The Soviet attacks on United States policy there prob ably reflect in part Moscow's irritation with Washington's support of the Israelis but also the fact that Moscow seems more interested at the moment in preserving the Soviet influ ence in Egypt and in bolstering the post‐Nasser leadership than in offering any alternatives or in backing any from other quarters.