Pact backs Soviet missile plan

Press, 9 December 1983, Page 6

Pact backs Soviet missile plan

NZPA-Reuter Vienna The seven-member Warsaw Pact, which ended a three-day ministerial meeting in Sofia yesterday, has unanimously agreed on plans to counter N.A.T.O.’s planned deployment of new American nuclear weapons in Western Europe. The official Bulgarian B.T.A. news agency said that the meeting, the first of senior Pact officials since Moscow walked out of the Geneva talks on limiting medium-range nuclear missiles last month, supported Soviet proposals which include the deployment of medium-range weapons in Czechoslovakia and East Germany. The meeting was attended by the Defence Ministers of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Rumania and the Com-mander-in-Chief of the Warsaw Pact forces, Marshal Viktor Kulikov, of the Soviet Union. The Czechoslovak Prime Minister, Mr Lubomir Strougal, said after meeting his East German colleague, Mr Willie Stoph, in East Berlin yesterday that the Pact’s counter-measures would include both the deployment of new missiles and a boost in conventional forces.

“The main thing is not only to install missiles but to strengthen the over-all defence capability of our country, for we must keep the balance of forces both in conventional and nuclear weapons,” Mr Strougal said. In Vienna, diplomats said that the Pact States at talks with N.A.T.O. on reducing conventional forces in central Europe were awaiting policy guidelines from the Sofia meeting.

Western sources said that the Pact representatives had still not confirmed a date for their resumption in January, but they did not believe the Communist side was planning to emulate the Soviet walkout from Geneva last month.

The B.T.A. report on the unanimity of the Sofia meeting indicated. that Rumania had gone along with its allies, despite its previous public criticism of both the United States and the Soviet Union for breaking off the Geneva talks.

Editorials in the official Rumanian press at the start and close of the meeting repeated Bucharest’s call to both sides to halt deployment of new missiles, freeze existing ones and return to the negotiating table. In Moscow yesterday the Soviet Union left open the possibility of merging the Strategic Arms Talks concerning long-range nuclear weapons systems and the ruptured ' Euromissile talks with Washing-

ton, the Tass news agency indicated.

Remarking that the merger of the two parallel sets of talks had become “the object of the speculation in the American and European press,” Tass blamed Washington for blocking agreement in the two sets of negotiations.

The last session of the fifth round of the START negotiations begun in July, 1982, is being held in Geneva. Tass noted that the American Deputy Defence Secretary, Mr Richard Perle, in Brussels for a N.A.T.O. meeting, and the director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Mr Kenneth Adelman, had both opposed the merger of the two sets of talks.

On Tuesday the Soviet Chief of General Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, said the combining of the talks was a “hypothetical question.”

Marshal Ogarkov added that the START talks were going in the same direction as the Euromissile negotiations, broken off by Moscow on November 23 after the installation of the first American Pershing 2 and cruise missiles in Western Europe. Washington interpreted Marshal Ogarkov’s remarks as a veiled threat to break off the START talks also.

On November 11, Trud, the organ of Soviet labour unions, published a statement by the Finnish Prime Minister, Mr Kalevi Sorsa, suggesting a merger of the Euromissile and START talks, indicating for the first time that Moscow was considering the idea.