TROOPS IN EUROPE Kennedy Calls For Reduction

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32232, 26 February 1970, Page 11

TROOPS IN EUROPE Kennedy Calls For Reduction

iN I Prist Association— Copyright)

WASHINGTON, February 25. Senator Edward Kennedy today called for the withdrawal of more than half of all the American troops stationed in Western Europe.

He was the first of a procession of senators appearing before a Democratic Party committee studying the rearrangement of national priorities. Senator Kennedy, the Democratic Whip, questioned a series of items in the Nix-on Administration’s defence budget, including the further deployment of the Safeguard A.B.M. system, which he

opposed in its initial form last year. “Last year I believed that the Safeguard was a waste of money,” Senator Kennedy said. “Nothing I’ve learned since then has changed my views.” Another contribution to cutting costs, he said, would be to bring home the majority of the 320,000 troops and their 250.000 dependants in Western Europe.

“We should le‘ the increas-ingly-prosperous nations of Western Europe contribute more to their own defence," Senator Kennedy said. “1 believe that if we examine our national situation with a new realism, we will see that we are truly taking risks Only if we fail to reduce and reallocate military spending.” The former Vice-President Mi Hubert Humphrey, deplored threats of another Presidential veto of an Appropriations Bill, carrying health and education: and the Secretary of Defence (Mr Melvin Laird) advocated spending money for new defence programmes. Senator Edmund Muskie, Of Maine, told the committee: “We must abandon the snail’s pace of the present Administration in shifting priorities. There must be more than token cuts in military spending. . . . Honest risks must be taken in search of peace and disarmament”