The World - News from March 17, 1985

Moscow’s chief negotiator at the new U.S.-Soviet arms talks, which opened in Geneva last week, criticized the United States for what he said was an impression that it wanted to revise the ground rules for the agenda that were set up at a meeting in January. Viktor P. Karpov said in a Soviet television interview that the subject and aims of the talks were settled at the January meeting when Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko and Secretary of State George P. Shultz agreed to treat the separate discussions on long-range missiles, medium-range missiles and space arms as interrelated. Karpov said the U.S. side seemed intent on discussing what he called the usefulness of a space-based defense system, known as “Star Wars.”