NATO Spurns Soviet Plan for Freeze on Mid-Range Missiles
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Tuesday formally rejected a Soviet proposal for a mutual freeze on deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, a senior American official said.
Richard R. Burt, assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, said NATO will make no counterproposal in response to the Soviet offer of April 7.
Burt said that officials from the 16 NATO nations, in their regular meeting as the alliance’s Special Consultative Group, unanimously rejected the Soviet proposal as a propaganda ploy.
“There was no discussion of the need to respond to the Soviet propaganda initiative with a similar propaganda initiative of our own,” he told a news conference. “We in the alliance do not want to engage in a public relations battle with the Soviet Union.”
Soviet party leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in an interview published April 7 by the Soviet newspaper Pravda, said his country was unilaterally halting deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles and that the moratorium would expire in November unless NATO did the same.
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