Russian pipeline splitting the West

Press, 2 March 1982, Page 19

Russian pipeline splitting the West

By

MARK FRANKLAND,

from London

The Reagan Administration’s determination to stop the pipeline which is planned to pump gas from Western Siberia to West Europe, starting in 1984, is developing into one of the most damaging family quarrels to trouble the Western Alliance.

The general strategy behind the American effort has been clearly stated by the American Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger. It is to ‘make Soviet industry increasingly obsolete” by reducing Western credits and sales of technology to the Soviet Union.

The Reagan Administration wants to stop the pipeline precisely because it will be, from the mid-1980s, Moscow’s chief earner of hard currency with which to buy advanced Western equipment.'

The United States Deputy Commerce Secretary told a sub-committee of the House of Representatives that it would be possible to stop the use of American components needed in the, pipeline’s construction. These are General Electric turbine parts for the 41 compressor stations that will drive the gas along the pipeline. The Americans hope that delaying these would make it impossible for European contractors to complete the turbines they have contracted to sell to the Soviet Union.

British experts doubt that this will work in the long run. Jonathan Stern, a leading London specialist in Soviet energy matters, believes the pipeline could be held up for as much as a year if the Americans are “one hundred per cent uncooperative.” He points out that the rotor technology needed to produce the parts in question is not particularly advanced, and that General Electric has its present monopoly because it is the only company that has the capacity to produce’ them in large numbers.

However, a French company, Alsthom-Atlantique, does have some capacity to produce the complete turbines using technology it acquired from G.E. several years ago.

But Stern points out that if European firms, including Alsthom, do find themselves caught in an American legal net, the Russians can be expected to take retaliatory measures.

A natural one, he believes, would be for the Russians to

refuse to'award contracts to any European firm that uses American licences or is liable to be restricted in its commercial dealings by American law. “If we get nasty with the Russians,” he says “they can get nasty with us.”

One of the main American arguments against the pipeline is that the Russians might threaten to turn off the gas supply to extract political concessions from West Europe. British specialists do not believe this.

Professor Alec Nove, of Glasgow University, argues that "the Russians could not turn off the tap without hurting themselves, unless it was a situation close to war.”

Michael Kaser, of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, makes the same point. He says that it would only make sense for Moscow to stop gas supplies “in conditions of near belligerency; and if things had reached that point we would be worrying about other things than gas.” The Russians have now started tb make this point themselves. Vadim Zagladin, the first deputy head of the Soviet Central Committee’s International Department and a member of President Leonid Brezhnev’s advisers’ circle, was asked in Paris last month if the Soviet Union would stick to the terms of the gas contract. “I shall tell you a story instead,” Zagladin answered his interviewer. “It is a true story. I go back to June 22, 1941 (the day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union). On that day Mr Brezhnev was one of the secretaries of the Dnepropetrovsk region (in the Ukraine). So what did he do first when he heard that war. had broken out? He said, we have to stop the Ukrainian wheat-trains, which were already on their way to Germany. I think that there is your reply.” The Reagan Administration is in no mood to accept this sort of assurance from a Russian official. Yet it is an interesting answer for it refers with unusual openness to something Soviet officials do not often talk about — the deliveries of Soviet food and raw materials to Germany that continued for almos’t two years after Hitler began his rampage in Europe. It is an argument worth pondering simply because it does not put Soviet policy at that time in a ' flattering light. Copyright — London Observer Service.