EUROPE’S HEAVY ARMAMENT MAY BE SOVIET DESIRE

Grey River Argus, 13 October 1948, Page 5

EUROPE’S HEAVY ARMAMENT MAY BE SOVIET DESIRE

To Collapse Marshall Aid Mr A. V. Alexander’s Conjecture (Rec. 9.30). LONDON, October 12. The Defence Minister, Mr A. V. Alexander, speaking at Bristol last night, said he thought it more than probable that the Soviet Union counted on forcing the Western European Powers to maintain such heavy armament, that the effect of the European Recovery Programme would be largely discounted.

“Russia may calculate that, in this way, she can, in due course, garner the fruits of war without ever firing a shot. Let but Western Europe equip itself with a carapace (shell of a turtle) too heavy to be borne, and the Soviets can stand by and watch the real democracies sink beneath its weight”. CHURCHILL’S JEERS

Mr Alexander criticised Mr Churchhill’s speech at the Conservatives’ conference at Llandudno. “Mr Churchill, of course, was speaking with one eye on Russia, and the other on the Americans, and their atom bomb, but I wonder whether, in this concentration on the gulf which has opened between the two great repositories of power in this modern world, there may not be a tendency to overlook the vital significance of the task immediately before us in Western Europe. “It is to the spiritual recovery and economic revival of the cradle of Western civilisation that our main efforts should, in these times, be directed. I do not deny that dangers threaten us. We must be prepared, and it was to that end that 1 recently met my colleagues, the Defence Ministers of the Brussels Treaty Powers in Paris. “The real answer to' the problem of our recovery is increased output per head. In the meantime, it does not help to hear jeers about living on charity. We must work with the trowel, while having the sword girded at our side”, he added.