NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY Invasion Unsettles Senators

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31781, 11 September 1968, Page 17

NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY Invasion Unsettles Senators

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright) WASHINGTON, September 10. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty will come up for its first test before United States senators today amid concern that reaction against Russia’s invasion of Czechoslovakia would block ratification of the pact this year.

Senate leaders tried to delay action on the treaty until after the elections for fear it would not get the two-thirds vote necessary’ for ratification by the full Senate.

But Senator Albert Gore (Democrat, Tennessee), a delegate to the Geneva conferences which hammered out the treaty, said he would force a vote when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee met today to discuss the treaty and other pending business.

The Secretary of State, Mr Dean Rusk, yesterday again urged the senators to approve the treaty when he briefed the committee on Czechoslovakia and the Paris peace talks. Mr Rusk told reporters that It was “in the vital interests” of the United States to ratify the treaty. He said Senate

action—or lack of it—would affect governments which had not signed the document, which is designed to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. President Johnson, VicePresident Hubert Humphrey and Mr Rusk pointedly reaffirmed their support for the treaty after the Senate majority leader, Mr Mike Mans-

field (Democrat, Montana) publicly expressed doubt last week that it could be ratified this year because of the Czechoslovak crisis. But Mr Richard Nixon, the Republican Presidential nominee, withheld his support, saying he had “some rather strong reservations” about some of the treaty’s provisions.

He did not specify which provisions troubled him. But during the committee’s hearings on the treaty in July, some witnesses expressed concern about adequate safeguards and inspection.

Should Mr Nixon come out strongly against the treaty, it would greatly stiffen resistance among senators unwilling to support action which might’be seen—especially in an election year—as a willingness to deal with Moscow in the wake of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Mr Rusk and other treaty supporters argued that the treaty was not a RussianAmerican document but a multi-lateral pact already sighed by nearly 80 nations.