Soviets Call on U.S. to Help Form World Space Organization

The Soviet Union today called on the United States to join Moscow in creating a World Space Organization, which would use a disputed Siberian radar base as its eye on the heavens.

Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze also said in his speech today to the U.N. General Assembly that the Security Council should hold foreign ministers’ meetings and offered Moscow as a site.

The 15-nation council also could meet in the capitals of the other permanent members, Washington, Paris, London and Beijing, Shevardnadze suggested.

And the United Nations should play a more active and direct role in eliminating the main threat to mankind, that of nuclear catastrophe, Shevardnadze said.

“Space should become an area for the United Nations’ priority attention,” he continued. “The international community has a vital interest in preventing it from becoming an arena for military rivalry.”

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev suggested earlier this month that the Soviet radar base at Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, be turned over to an international agency for the peaceful exploration of space.

The United States says the radar base violates the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and must be demolished.

Shevardnadze said that the United States should join the Soviets in the world space agency and donate U.S. radar units in Greenland and Britain.

Shevardnadze said that the latest Soviet diplomatic initiative was sincere and that he wanted to make the United Nations a “unique global center for ensuring universal and regional security, and the security of each country.”

Turning to Afghanistan, Shevardnadze said “the Geneva accords are not just an isolated local instance of a regional conflict settlement. . . . They are a new promising beginning in world politics, attesting to a qualitative change in political thinking.”