West sees Soviet missile freeze as propaganda ploy

Press, 18 March 1982, Page 8

West sees Soviet missile freeze as propaganda ploy

NZPA-Reuter Washington President Reagan has re- . jected Leonid Brezhnev’s partial freeze on Soviet missiles targeted on Western Europe as a propaganda move that would leave Moscow free to continue its nuclear build-up. -The Reagan Administration, repsonding swiftly to President Brezhnev’s announcement of the freeze in a speech to Soviet tradeunion leaders yesterday, said it was an attempt to split the Atlantic alliance and predicted that it would fail. The halt in deployment of the new triple-warhead SS2O missiles came one day after the Reagan Administration, said (Moscow had deployed 300 of them, while no similar deployments had been made by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. 'Officials said the fact that the freeze was being applied only to deployments west of the Ural mountains made it meaningless. 'They said that the 4800kmrange SS2Os east of the Urals could still hit Western Europe while those further away could easily be moved to’, within striking distance. -The freeze applied only so long as the United States did not make “practical preparations” to deploy new Pershing 2 and Cruise missiles in Western Europe.. N.A.T.O. agreed in December,. 1979, to deploy 572 of

these missiles to counter the Soviet nuclear build-up and at the same time seek nuclear negotiations. The negotiations began last November but have now gone into recess for two months. The United States has proposed a "zero option” under which the Soviet SS2Os, along with older SS4s and SS5s, would be destroyed in exchange for N.A.T.O.’s abandonment of its deployment plan. Deployment of the new N.A.T.O. missiles will start late next year but preparations would begin earlier. For the first time Mr Brezhnev yesterday also speljed put: liow -Moscow would respond' to thd proposed Western build-up, issuing a threat to install similar weapons in range of United States territory. “Brezhnev’s freeze proposal is designed, like previous Soviet statements over the past three years, to direct attention away from the enormous growth of Soviet capabilities that has taken place,” the ' White House said. . Other officials called it a transparent ploy to split the N.A.T.O. alliance and said people would not be naive enough to believe it represented genuine arms control. Other officials in the West reacted with coolness to the announcement, seeing it as a cosmetic exercise likely to

score propaganda points for the Soviet Union. “Whether this is a step in the right direction depends on whether the Soviet Union wants to mark a turningpoint in its medium-range missile armament programme,” an official West German statement said. A British Foreign Office official called the move “very much a propaganda initiative which, when looked at, has very little in it." A White House counsellor, Edwin Meese, said the Kremlin move was aimed at freezing into place an existing numerical missile advantage already favouring the Soviet Union. Mr Meese, in a television interview, compared Mr Brezhnev’s announcement to “a situation wherftwo-thirds of the way through a football game, one side is ahead 50 to nothing ... (and) then they want to freeze the score for the rest of the game.” A senior analyst for the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the Soviet move had a ’ “certain amount of propaganda content,” but could be interpreted also as an attempt to speed-up the Geneva negotiations on medium-range weapons. “It seems they are desperately concerned that things may come apart. It would be wrong to underestimate that concern. They have an awful lot to lose,” the analyst said.