Tough stand by Kremlin over rockets

Press, 19 August 1983, Page 6

Tough stand by Kremlin over rockets

NZPA-Reuter Moscow

The Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, indicated yesterday that the Kremlin would regard the disarmament talks in Geneva as effectively over once N.A.T.O. began stationing new United States medium-range missiles in Western Europe. Mr Andropov told a visiting American trade union leader that the Soviet Union was showing a flexible and constructive attitude at the Geneva talks. The official Tass news agency quoted Mr Andropov as saying: “We shall continue to do so until the United States Government, by starting deploying new nuclear missiles close to us, on European territory, compels us to concentrate on defensive counter-measures in order to ensure the security of the Soviet people and its allies.”

There have been warnings from Moscow, backed by comments from East Berlin and Prague, that the Soviet Union might respond to deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles by stationing new weapons on the soil of its allies.

Mr Andropov received a plaque depicting linked hands, symbolising United States-Soviet friendship, from William Winpisinger, head of the United States International Association of Machinists and Aerospace

Engineers, who was in Moscow on a private visit. There have already been hints from the Kremlin that it will adopt a tough position if American missile deployment goes ahead. The United States and its N.A.T.O. allies say that they will begin stationing the new missiles unless they reach an agreement with the Soviets at Geneva.

A Western diplomat called the threats and coun-ter-threats a “vastly complicated and dangerous game of chicken in which both sides wait for the other to give in first” In Bonn, a senior West German official warned the United States yesterday not to concede anything at Geneva that would endanger European security. Alfred Dregger, the parliamentary leader of Dr Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union and its Christian Social Union sister party, said: “The security of West Germany and Europe, not of the United States, is at the forefront.”

He said that as long as the Soviet Union retained SS2O medium-range nuclear missiles, the deployment of American missiles in West Germany, starting in December, was unavoidable. “There can be no mistakes over Pershing 2. There must be an agreement, but no wrong concessions.”