East Bloc Asks Troop Cuts

The Warsaw Pact alliance of Communist nations in Eastern Europe, meeting in Budapest, Hungary, proposed a broad program for arms control, including a call to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to join in removing more than 500,000 troops on each side from European bases by the early 1990s. The proposal also would expand existing East-West talks on reduction of forces. In Brussels, NATO’s secretary general, Lord Carrington, pledged careful consideration of the Soviet package by a new NATO task force on conventional weapons.