Eastern Bloc and Gorbachev

It’s good to read something other than euphoric nonsense (“Bush, a Giving Guy, Gets Nothing,” by Patrick Buchanan, Opinion, Dec. 10) about the Malta summit. As long as the Russians hold 11,000 warheads at our head, they can’t be counted as friends, no matter the rhetoric.

The Germans and the Russians have done more than any other peoples to cause death and destruction in the 20th Century. Before we feel glee over the loss of power of the communists in East Germany, before we praise the possibility of German reunification, before we call Mikhail Gorbachev or any other Russian friend, remember the basic casualty figure of World War II: 50 million dead. That figure doesn’t include the deaths of World War I or the Stalinist purges of the 1950s.

JIM REAGAN

Norwalk