GLIMMERS OF COURAGE flashed briefly through the general gloom of international events during the past 12 months, but there is little to be cheerful about in looking ahead to the rest of 1982.

The polish people rallied around a proud union in a drive for more bread and more freedom. Under Soviet direction, the Communist establishment responded with quick and bloody punishment. The Israelis bravely surrendered the Sinai as the last provision of their peace with Egypt but simultaneously stepped up a dangerous expansion into the Golan Heights. Arab nations continued their policy of constant confrontation, and neither side moved toward the adoption of joint responsibility for the Palestinians. The United States, meanwhile, set forth no clear foreign policy other than that of threatening renewed American military might, with which we will presumably recapture the world of 30 years ago that President Reagan believes we never should have left.

The list of international conflicts stretches so long that individual events blur into a single image of fruitless struggle. While the British repay Argentine aggression with a surrealistic blitz on two of the world's most inconsequential sheep polities, the Italians and Iraqis are combining traditional Moslem internecine hatred with modern weaponry to produce thousands of dead bodies.

As they have since World War Two, the two superpowers led the way since last June in the oppressive intervention department. Washington continued its frantic efforts to prop up an illusory domino in El Salvador, ignoring past lessons that war torn nations need peace and non-interference, not American guns. Moscow still has 100,000 heavily armed campers bunking down in Kabul.

Yet of all discouraging signs, the continuing failure to make real progress on decreasing the risk of nuclear conflict remains the most disturbing. The dangers have long been common knowledge: the slaughter of hundreds of millions, the collapse of civilizations and perhaps the destruction of whole regions of the planet. Popular sentiment in this country and in Europe has finally mounted in organized opposition to these risks. Yet beneath the rhetorical softening of American and Soviet positions lurks the firm conviction that there is greater security in the current standoff than in perhaps allowing the other side to sneak into a position of "superiority" while negotiating reductions.

While the conventional assessment of all the rest of international relations yields pessimism, the nuclear arms question has produced a perverse and often unspoken optimism. The system has worked. Deterrence has prevented war in Europe for 37 years and allowed only minimal brushes between the two superpowers. Why push it?

The reasons to push are crucial, and in the coming years they must be forced upon world leaders. The sheer size and sophistication of the U.S. and Soviet arsenals have increased so dramatically in recent years that there is now a tremendous danger of losing control of these forces. Battlefield weapons on the European frontier, for example, present the threat of elevating a conventional conflict to a type of war that even the most experienced generals concede is almost impossible to visualize. Proliferation to nations with no shake in or conception of global nuclear balance has yet to raise a specific threat, but within the next two decades it will occur unless the superpowers cut off the arms race and redirect intellectual and technical power toward peaceful purposes..

Arms reductions are the only way to prove the superpowers joint determination to decrease the nuclear threat. Contrary to the arguments of the strategists cozily debating throw-weights in the Pentagon and the Kremlin, cuts would not endanger world security--especially if both sides retained an interim force of virtually invulnerable weapons, such as those based on submarines. Instead, reductions would create a better climate in which to enforce a non-proliferation policy. Cuts in vulnerable land-based systems would enhance stability by reducing the temptation for disabling first strikes.

Fewer weapons would mean fewer plans for using weapons, such as the one the Reagan Administration has recently produced for waging a multi-year nuclear campaign, as if the surviving fraction of each nation's population would care who finally "won." Deterrence would thus reemerge as the only reason to have whatever nuclear warheads exist, and deadly accidents would be made less likely.

Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev spoke with a new passion in the past year about substantial cuts in nuclear capacity. But at the negotiating table this summer, their representatives will haggle over the same old minutiae, such as how to classify the plethora of weapons systems. Failure, when combined with the inevitable confrontations over other world issues, will likely lead the two leaders back to the saber-rattling with which they are so much more comfortable.

What is needed is a jarring action--one that will indicate the birth of a whole new framework for the nuclear arms question and a new investment in the dream of a world free of the shadow of the Ivy-drogen bomb.

Both sides could begin by freezing nuclear arms productions at current levels and redoubling non-proliferation efforts while negotiating cuts. Considering the size of the existing deterrents. President Reagan's fears of the Soviets "getting ahead" seem laughable. We could also declare a joint no first use policy, or reposition European theater weapons further away from their targets to decrease the chance of battlefield escalation. All of these proposals were pushed before the public for the first time in the past year, and people must work to keep them alive until they are implemented.

Finally, there is the recently publicized proposal of a former director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Noel Gayler: massive cuts in each side's arsenal without the distraction of classification and verifiability. Gayler suggests that each side simply junk an arbitrary number of warhead of its own choice--whether land-based missile warheads, bombs, or artillery shells--under the supervision of a special international commission. Each side would naturally turn in its most vulnerable weapons, retaining its best deterrent. After a few trial runs with tiny numbers of the uniquely identifiable commodities, larger amounts could be turned in and dismantled. Confidence would soar, and the process could continue on a regular schedule until each side had only a small number of devices in a strategic reserve.

There would be no guarantee that progress on the nuclear front would lead to a greater willingness to compromise on non-nuclear confrontations. One suspects that the tension in the Middle East will never above altogether, that the absurdities such as the one going on in the South Atlantic will crop up as long as national sovereignty exists. But we have a responsibility, perhaps above all others, to shrink the nuclear peril. Arms reduction will help that cause. We must act.