Pentagon estimates Soviet warhead lead

Press, 20 June 1984, Page 10

Pentagon estimates Soviet warhead lead

NZPA-Reuter Washington

The Soviet Union had about 34,000 nuclear warheads—an edge of 8000 over the United States, American defence officials said yesterday. The Soviets had taken the lead about five years ago, but Western military analysts had continued to believe the United States had more warheads, they said.

The new figures for the United States and Soviet nuclear stockpiles were in an article in the magazine “Arms Control Today," which said that the Pentagon Defence Department estimated the Soviet Union had 34,000 nuclear warheads compared with 26,000 for the United States.

The Defence Secretary, Mr Caspar Weinberger, asked about the Soviet

nuclear lead, said, “It shouldn’t be a surprise, really.” “We’ve been talking about the enormous Soviet expansion of their military power, their offensive military power, for a long time,” he said.

The defense officials said that the figures had been given in classified evidence to the House of Representatives in March and declassified under the Freedom of Information Act at the request of the authors of the article.

The evidence was given by Richard Wagner, the Assistant Secretary of Defence for Atomic Energy. Mr Weinberger said that the estimates had been classified but that he and others in the Pentagon had long sounded warnings of the Soviet arms build-up in ar-

guing for a bigger defence budget. “Nobody has bothered to listen, but these are things we have been trying to impress upon the Congress as a need for our own modernisation.”

While public knowledge that the Soviets led in warheads would lend support to Administration efforts to increase arms spending, defence officials said, the figures had not made public earlier because such estimates were considered sensitive information.

Military analysts said that the Pentagon probably could have kept the figures secret despite the freedom of information request. In other instances there had been long legal battles to prevent disclosure of military data.