Gorbachev offers missile cut for curbed space research

Press, 18 June 1986, Page 10

Gorbachev offers missile cut for curbed space research

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, has disclosed details of a new offer to the United States to restrict space weapons research in return for a cut in strategic nuclear arsenals.

Mr Gorbachev outlined the offer — Moscow’s first to accept formally the “star wars” research — in a speech to the Communist Party’s central committee, in which he also said a United States-Soviet summit meeting was still possible.

“If the American side ignores, this time as well our initiatives, it will become clear that the present U.S. Administration is playing an unseemly game in the most serious question which determines the future of Man-

kind,” he said. Moscow made the new arms proposals in Geneva several weeks ago and some details have been leaked by American officials. Mr Gorbachev proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union abide by the anti-ballistic missile treaty of 1972 for another 15 years. The treaty, which will expire next year, limits defences against missile attack. Moscow says the American strategic defence initiative for a space shield will violate its terms.

Research on space weapons would be limited to the laboratory, “that is, the threshold already actually reached by the U. 5.,” Mr Gorbachev said.

Moscow has been unstintingly hostile to S.D.I. for the last two years and has said it must be scrapped as a condition for cuts in long-range nuclear arsenals.

Although officials had raised the possibility of accepting limits to research, such an offer had not been publicly made before, diplomats said.

Mr Gorbachev said that at the same time Moscow proposed limiting longrange nuclear arsenals to 8000 warheads and 1600 delivery systems; medium-range weapons reduction would be resolved separately.

Western officials said the mathematics of the new Soviet proposals implied larger cuts in the Soviet arsenal than the

American one. The two super-Powers have been trying to negotiate curbs on both categories of nuclear weapons and a deal on space weapons at the Geneva talks since March last year. Mr Gorbachev’s proposals were the latest in a stream from the Kremlin that diplomats see as aimed at bringing pressure on Washington to maintain the arms control process. The President of the United States, Mr Ronald Reagan, enraged the Kremlin earlier this month when he announced that the United States planned to cease abiding by the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty signed in 1979, at the end of the year.