VIENNA (APN) — A new
round, the 17th, of talks is begin-
ning here on a mutual reduction of
armed forces and armaments in
Central Europe. Nineteen coun-
tries, belonging to the Warsaw
Treaty and North Atlantic Treaty
Organizations, have been con-
ducting these negotiations for 63
months now without any signi-
ficant signs of progress: What are
the chances for any advance this
time?

Moscow believes that the
socialist countries have gone even
further than their half of the road.
On June 8, 1978, the Warsaw Tre-
aty nations set forth realistic and
sensible compromise proposals
offering sufficient ground for a
mutually-acceptable agreement.

The socialist countries are
ready to establish equal collective

‘‘ceilings’’ in the numerical
strength of troops for each side,
which in principle, meets the idea

advanced by Western countries:.

The Soviet Union and its allies
have agreed to put aside the ques-
tion of air force reductions, on
which the West has insisted so
much. Taking NATO's position
into consideration, agreement has
also been given to the withdrawal
of about 1,000 Soviet tanks from
the region. The socialist countries
now likewise do not object to re-
ductions starting with the ground
troops of the Soviet Union and
the United States and even at a
ratio of two to one.

At the beginning, the West
noted the importance of this in-
itiative on the part of the Warsaw
Treaty Organization, but later re-
turned to its old position. The

“Sure, we can blow up the world, but if the
Russians can blow up the world twice, we're goners”

Western delegates led the matter
to a point where they wanted to
win military superiority for
NATO. They began once more to
stubbornly uphold their old prop-
osal of an asymmetric reduction,
alleging that the Warsaw Treaty
Organization had 150,000 more
soldiers in Central Europe than
the other side.

But the fact of an existing ap-
proximate parity is admitted. This
was acknowledged by U.S. Assis-
tant Secretary of State Kenneth
Rush in the Senate on July 15,
1973; by James Schlesinger, then
U.S. Defence Secretary, also in
Congress in the period of 1974-
1975, and by President Gerald
Ford in Helsinki on August 1,
1975. A research paper, drawn up
by 4 group of prominent U.S.
political figures, including the
present Secretary of State, Cyrus
Vance and published in the USA
in November 1976, also spoke of
an approximate military balance
in Central Europe.

Since then, the Soviet Union
has not added a single soldier ora
Single tank to its armed forces and
armaments in that area, which
cannot be said of NATO and
especially the United States, who
are reinforcing their armed forces
in the region both quantitatively
and qualitatively,

Theré-are apprehensions that
the NATO countries have come
for the 17th round of the talks with
the intention of complicating
them still more, and, mainly, to
upset the jointly-agreed principle
of undiminished security of any of

en

What the country faces.as.it rebuilds
Waa

A reality in today’s Vietnam

Given the current attacks
against Vietnam both by the
Western media and by China, it

ay be all too easy to forget what
the Vietnamese people endured
throughout three decades of con-
stant war.

For those who dare to write
that Vietnam nurtures expan-
sionist dreams and plans incur-
sions against its neighbors (which
was charged during the recent
events in Kampuchea) it may help
to recall not only the three de-
cades of terrible war and destruc-
tion, but what that country. faces
today.

John Pilgar, a writer for the
British New Statesman, spent
years in South Vietnam during the
war. He, in fact, was one of the
jast journalists to be spirited out
of Saigon before the liberation in
April 1975, Pilgar recently re-
turned and wrote a long story
about what the country looks like

-and the uphill climb ahead. A

short excerpt, however, tells

much:
* * *

‘Much of North Vietnam is a
moonscape from which visible
signs of life — houses, factories,
schools, hospitals, pagodas,
churches — have been obliter-
ated. In some forests there are no
longer birds and animals, and
there are truck drivers who do not
respond to the honking of a horn
because they are deaf from the
incessant sounds of bombs. More
than 30,000 children in Hanoi and
Haiphong were permanently
deafened during the twelve nights

of bombings at Christmas, 1972.
In Hanoi’s Bachmai Hospital,
doctors have discovered that
Napalm B, an amalgam of ben-
zine, polystyrene, and gasoline,
which the Dow Chemical Co.
created especially for Vietnam,
continues to moulder under the
skin’s tissues through the lifetime
of its victims.

Vietnamese women strolling in Ho Chi Minh City.

Today most villages in the
North have their own museum of
U.S. Air Force scrap: a pilot’s
helmet, a boot, a Batman comic.
At Congloc, which was bombed

_back to the Stone Age and

beyond, leaving craters that have
merged into a swamp, are the
graves of an entire anti-aircraft
militia unit, all women ...

The fact of an approximate parity of NATO and Warsaw Treaty troops
in Europe has been established despite Western claims to the contrary
as the 17th round of talks open in Vienna on a mutual reduction of forces
in Central Europe. The USSR has not added a single soldier or tank since
1976 and has offered the West realistic proposals for mutual reductions.
Our photos show Soviet troops during military training.

the parties and to destabilize the
situation in Europe.

This is based on the fact that
the West today links the Vienna
and SALT-2 talks under the pre-
text that a SALT agreement
without ‘“‘compensation” by its
tactical..nuclear. weapons. al-
legedly renders Western Europe
‘*defenceless’’ before the USSR.
However, silence is deliberately

maintained over the numerous—

U.S. forward-based weapons and
the nuclear missiles of certain
European member countries. of
NATO trained everyone knows
where.

The United States could play a
big part in curbing this destabiliz-
ing trend. However; to our regret,
the United States has taken prac-
tical steps on the question of mak-
ing new types of weapons —
Cruise missiles, improved Persh-
ing missiles, and a new medium-
range ballistic missile with a nuc-
lear warhead — for deployment in
Europe.

All this clearly runs counter to
the purposes of the Vienna talks.
A continued standstill can only
lead to irreversible changes in the
military situation in Europe.

U.S. Presidential National
Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski instructed U.S. intel-
ligence services to prepare a de-

‘tailed study on the situation in a

number of Moslem countries and
in respective religious move-
ments with a stress laid on ‘‘exp-
losive’’ regions, including Af-
ghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, the
Philippines and, of course, Iran.

The CIA has also taken aim at
sovereign states in the Middle and
Near East and at countries which,
according ‘to Brzezinski, are
situated in the ‘‘crisis zone’? —
Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia,
Somalia and others.

No secret is made of the fact
that the USA intends to intensify
its subversive activity against re-
ligious Moslem movements in the
countries of that region which are
a source of oil and other raw
materials and-which, from the
U.S. point of view, have strategic
importance for its policy.

Observers point out that
developments in Iran were a di-
rect cause for escalating Ameri-
can machinations in that zone. As
various schemes of *‘settling’’ the
Iranian crisis, which the USA is

trying to impose on that country,
are collapsing, and events in Iran
are developing in the direction
that suits the U.S. administration
less and less, one could hear more
clearly irritated voices in
Washington asking: ‘‘Who over-
looked Iran?”’

Some leaders in Washington
accuse the CIA of inefficiency,
others criticize the president for
not sending a special naval unit to
the Persian Gulf and creating a
“‘democratic’’ government. Ac-
cording to Washington’s logic, it
is the American navy which is re-
sponsible for the ‘‘creation of
democracy”’ in other countries.

In an attempt to save its
privileges and ensure military
strategic interests at any price,
the USA resorts to a similar pol-
icy towards Iran’s neighbors
which led the present Iranian re-
gimé to a crisis — the policy of
intensifying its pressure, increas-
ing arms deliveries and
shamelessly interfering in their in-
ternal affairs.

It looks like Washington has
determined to put out the flame of
growing anti-American senti-
ments in the Moslem east by pour-
ing oil on them.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FEBRUARY 23, 1979—Page 7