Soviets to Resume Nuclear Tests; No Date Announced

The Kremlin confirmed Thursday that it plans to resume nuclear testing after an 18-month pause and said the decision was justified by Soviet security interests and the need to develop new weapons.

Soviet officials gave no date for the first test.

But they said that Moscow will not attempt to match the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative--the “Star Wars” program--and again called for a ban on nuclear testing.

At a news conference, the officials denounced the U.S. nuclear test in Nevada on Tuesday as a “cynical act.” The Soviet Union had warned last December that it would end its unilateral test moratorium after the first U.S. blast of 1987.

“By this provocative step, the American Administration has rejected the example of the Soviet Union and its calls to convert the moratorium into a two-way measure to halt the arms race,” Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir F. Petrovsky said.

Petrovsky declined to give a date for the resumption of testing or to say whether preparatory work had begun at the proving ground near Semipalatinsk, in Soviet Kazakhstan.

Yevgeny M. Primakov, director of the world economics and international relations institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, said Moscow does not intend to develop weapons matching those of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

“Our response to the American ‘Star Wars’ program will not necessarily be symmetrical, and nuclear tests will not be designed to build symmetrical weapons,” he said.

Yevgeny P. Velikhov, vice president of the Academy of Science and a leading adviser on nuclear matters, said the U.S. aim of making nuclear arms obsolete by creating an impenetrable missile shield in space through SDI was unrealizable.

“I believe neither the United States nor anyone else in the world has a weapon which will make nuclear weapons obsolete and impotent,” he asserted.