A-Bombings ‘Barbarous’--Gorbachev

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev today called the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 40 years ago “barbarous” and told Japan that he hopes to prevent the tragedy “from ever being repeated anywhere in the world.”

“I deeply sympathize with the grief and terrible sufferings that fell to the lot of the victims of the barbarous American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Gorbachev wrote in a reply to a letter from Japanese victims of the bombs.

“I fully share your ardent desire to prevent the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from ever being repeated anywhere in the world,” he wrote in a letter to S. Ito, chairman of the Japanese Council of Victims of Atomic Bombings.

In the letter, Gorbachev for a second time called on the United States to join it in halting nuclear tests on the 40th anniversary of the bombings.

Proposal Dismissed

Last week he said the Soviet Union would refrain from nuclear testing for five months to mark the anniversary and would prolong the moratorium indefinitely if the United States followed suit.

Washington dismissed Gorbachev’s moratorium proposal as a propaganda ploy to capture world attention.

Gorbachev, in his letter, contended that the West’s refusal to completely eliminate nuclear weapons had forced Moscow to seek “possible intermediate solutions” at the Geneva arms talks.

“We encounter on the part of the West an absence of readiness to achieve a complete prohibition and liquidation of nuclear arms,” Gorbachev charged, adding that the “posture of the American side” blocks the reaching of an accord.

In several recent statements, Gorbachev has similarly condemned the United States for blocking the talks and made veiled threats to quit the negotiations if Washington did not change its posture.

Those hints were not repeated in the letter, however.