NATO Ministers Upset by Danish Nuclear Proviso

The defense ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization expressed “widespread concern” here Thursday at a resolution of the Danish Parliament that would make it difficult for U.S. or British ships carrying nuclear weapons to enter Danish ports.

“Ministers made it abundantly clear that no one wished to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign member country of the alliance,” said the NATO secretary general, Lord Carrington, after a two-day meeting here. “But there was widespread concern about the situation and agreement on the importance of supporting NATO’s agreed strategy and the principles of shared burdens and benefits.”

The conservative Danish government has called a snap general election for May 10 because it is upset over passage in Parliament two weeks ago of an opposition resolution that would remind incoming ships that Denmark’s laws bar nuclear arms in peacetime.

NATO policy is that U.S. and British captains neither confirm nor deny that nuclear weapons are carried aboard a particular ship.

Britain’s wartime role would be to reinforce Denmark with 13,500 troops, a task that London says could not be carried out if the Danish resolution is enforced.

Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci said that NATO nuclear policy should not be “whittled away” by statements of member nations.

Carlucci called the Danish resolution, sponsored by the Social Democrats, a “fundamental challenge to essential policies of the alliance” and said it could undermine U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations.

“We are negotiating with the Soviet Union the most far-reaching reductions of nuclear weapons in the history of the world, and these kinds of unilateral moves tend very much to undercut these negotiations,” he said.

The alliance’s nuclear strategy was confirmed at the semiannual meeting of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group as the defense ministers pledged to move ahead “step by step” with modernizing short-range nuclear weapons to compensate for the impending loss of ground-launched intermediate-range nuclear missiles, which the Soviet Union and the United States have agreed to eliminate.

However, a decision on the specific choice and deployment of new short-range missile systems has been put off for at least a year.

A key reason the ministers wish to keep weapons “up-to-date,” they said, is that a U.S. intelligence briefing showed that the Soviets are continuing their own nuclear force modernization.

This process includes reducing the range of some Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, which now would be aimed at Western European targets previously covered by the Soviet intermediate-range missiles scheduled to be dismantled once the INF treaty is ratified. The INF accord provides for scrapping land-based nuclear missiles with ranges between 300 and 3,400 miles.

The defense ministers agreed there has been “no relaxation” of Soviet military strength, which, the NATO communique said, “constituted a fundamental source of tension between East and West.”

Thus, it added, the Atlantic Alliance needs the “appropriate mix of conventional and nuclear forces” to maintain its policy of deterrence.