Rejection Of Note On Berlin Expected

Press, Volume C, Issue 29555, 3 July 1961, Page 11

Rejection Of Note On Berlin Expected

(N Z Press Association.—‘Copynyht) 1 WASHINGTON, July 2. The West was expected to send a reply within a week rejecting Mr Khrushchev’s note of June 11 on West Berlin, the Associated Press said today.

The Assistant United States Secretary of State for European Affairs, Mr Foy Kohler, and the Ambassadors of Britain, France and West Germany. would probably meet tomorrow to put the reply in its final form.

Officials in Washington made it clear that while the West was willing to negotiate a settlement it would not do so on Soviet terms. Mr Khrushchev had threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany by the end of the year. The treaty would give the East Germans control over land and air access routes to West Berlin, which if shut down, would isolate the Western military garrisons and civilian population there. The civilians considered their sector a part of West Germany. United States officials said it was doubtful that the West would make any counterproposals on Berlin. But the Western Note was expected to take up the Soviet Note, point by point, and reply to each.

The general tenor i as expected to be one that left the door open to negotiation, but that underscored the West’s consistent position of the past that the Western Powers and the Soviet Union

'created the present status of Berlin in a four-Power agreement and that the status could be changed only with the consent of all four. At the Geneva talks on banning nucleat tests on Friday, the Soviet Union - exposed an East-West “marriage’’ oetween communist demands for a complete arms ban, and Western insistence on effective controls, "Let us make a marriage, the Soviet delegate . (Mr Semyon Tsarapkin) said. “We are prepared to accept your controls if you are prepared to accept our disarmament measures.” Western conference sources characterised the Sovic’ proposal as "a shotgun wedding.” Earlier the Soviet delegate had said the United States had an “imperialist concept of security." It wanted to protect its boundaries with military bases thousands of miles away, surrounding the Soviet Union. The United States delegate (Mr Charles Slelle) said the question of control was the central issue of the nuclear conference, but it was only too obvious that the Soviet Union wanted to have complete charge of any control measures through toe veto. The conference will meet again on Monday.