Soviet Union to test missiles

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33464, 20 February 1974, Page 14

Soviet Union to test missiles

(N.Z.PA.-Reuter—Copyright) GENEVA, February 19.

Soviet and United States nuclear arms negotiators today will begin another attempt to work out a permanent agreement to limit and later reduce the numbers of their countries’ most destructive weapons. But a report from Moscow cast a shadow over the conference even before it got under way.

The report said that the Soviet Union would start testing advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles today.

The new round of tests was announced by Tass, which said that “launchings of carrier rockets” from the Soviet Union to the Pacific would be made from February 19 to March 10. The impact area is about 2000 miles east of Tokyo. Western experts said that they presumed that the tests would be a continuation of Soviet experiments to perfect individually-targeted multiple warheads (M.1.R.V.). Such a series was conducted las* month.

They said that Russia’s programme of testing M.I.R.V.s, together with U.S. research and development on new weapons systems might prove incompatible with an early accord on placing a

permanent limit on strategic arms.

Delegations headed by the Kremlin Deputy Foreign Minister (Mr Vladimir Semyonov), and the United States Ambassador-at-Large (Mr U. Alexis Johnson) will meet at the Soviet mission in Geneva to resume Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (S.A.L.T.), adjourned more than three months ago in apparent stalemate. A major United States Senate authority on defence matters, Senator Henry Jackson, said shortly after the last talks ended in November that the Russians had proposed a draft treaty “so one-sided as to be completely unacceptable to the United States.” No detail of the complex and secret negotiations have been disclosed because both sides have pledged not to divulge their substance.