Rebel Rumania blocks Kremlin’s missile plan

Press, 30 June 1983, Page 10

Rebel Rumania blocks Kremlin’s missile plan

NZPA-Reuter Moscow

Soviet leaders have failed to gain backing for their threat to respond to new Western missile deployments at a one-day meeting of the Communist Warsaw Pact military alliance in Moscow.

A joint statement issued by the seven Pact leaders yesterday called for an East-West accord which would render the American weapons unnecessary. But it made no mention of how the Soviet bloc would retaliate if the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation went ahead with its plans to station 572 Pershing 2 and cruise missiles in Western Europe from the end of this year. East European sources said that the unscheduled summit conference had been convened largely to discuss the missile issue and was expected to endorse a Soviet threat issued last month to station new weapons of its own in Eastern Europe.

But the text of the statement, which avoided the usual sharp Soviet rhetorical attacks on the West and concentrated on a need for disarmament and detente, showed that the Kremlin chiefs had failed to gain all-

round backing for their stand. It appeared that Rumania, which has consistently opposed any more nuclear arms build-ups in either East or West Europe, had blocked the issue of a toughly-worded joint warning on the missile question. The President, Mr Nicolae Ceausescu, was reported to be reluctant to attend the meeting in the first place. In a clear sign of disenchantment with Soviet military policies he published an interview on the day of conference indirectly criticising Moscow’s military in-

tervention in Afghanistan. The joint statement repeated earlier Warsaw Pact calls for a freeze on East-West military arsenals and a non-aggression treaty between N.A.T.O. and the Warsaw Pact. It also appealed for a freeze on military budgets from January next year and said that the money saved should be spent on Third World development aid. Similar proposals have been made by Rumania several times before. The Communist Party chiefs said that they supported Moscow’s stand at the current United StatesSoviet missile talks in Geneva and called for an accord which would preclude any need to deploy the new American weapons. Last month’s Soviet statement said that Moscow and its allies would respond to the American missiles by installing new weapons of their own. That was widely seen as a threat to put new battlefield nuclear missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. With Rumania’s opposition to any new missiles in either East or West well known, it remained unclear what the Kremlin had hoped to gain from yesterday’s meeting.