Who’s next for an A-bomb?

Press, 10 February 1983, Page 17

Who’s next for an A-bomb?

Eleven more countries — Argentina, Libya, South Korea, Taiwan, Iraq, Pakistan,' Brazil, Japan, West Germany, Israel, and South Africa — may all have nuclear weapons capable of blowing up other countries by the end of this century, according to a secret United States Air Force document. The document, entitled Air Force 2000, was recently circulated widely within the Pentagon in an effort to start senior officials thinking about future weapons planning. Much of it is labelled “unclassified,” including such basic “assumptions” as that “there will be, in the next two decades, no general war... Involving catastrophic engagements among super or major Powers” and more ominously, that “there will be no world-wide disarmament.” But secret sections of the report offer some predictions of what kind of military

By

MARK HOSENBALL

“Sunday Times,” London

threats the United Stales air force expects to face. For a start, one passage labelled "Confidential” says that “the perception of warfare as a legitimate means of settling international disputes will gain greater acceptance.” On the other hand, a paragraph labelled “Secret — No Foreign Dissemination,” holds less gloomily that "it appears unlikely that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. will confront each other in Europe militarily,” because all the countries concerned “are working politically, economically, and militarily to' deter war there.” W'here future wars are most likely to be fought, in the air force’s view, is given in another secret paragraph, which singles out “the area plus or minus 30 degrees latitude from the Equator.” For example, it says, without a settlement of the ArabIsraeli issue, war in the Middle East is “virtually inevitable.”