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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JULY 2, 1982
PAGE 13
to cool European anger.
ASSOCIATED PRESS wire:
Here is a June 30 report received over our
Western European leaders informed the Reagan Administration that
its unilateral sanctions against Common Market nations "seriously
jeopardize" free world trade....The content of their discussions
was not disclosed, but the meeting followed a two-day summit of
the 10-nation European Community dominated by recent U.S. re
strictions on European steel exports and the supply of U.S.
equipment for the Soviet Siberian natural gas pipeline to Western
Europe.•..
French President Francois Mitterrand called the American measures
"coercive, vexing, unfair and dangerous." Mitterrand, whose
country hosted last month's summit of Western leaders in Ver
sailles, suggested it might be useless to hold future summits.
But Tuesday's Common Market statement was a watered-down version
of a much harsher protest abandoned under pressure from British
PrimeMinisterMargaret Thatcher. [Mrs. Thatcher added, however,
that it is dangerous for the U.S. to force firms outside America
using
u.s.
technology to break contracts already entered into.
J
Speaking of Mrs. Thatcher, on June 23 the British Prime Minister presented
a remarkably clear-headed picture of the issues of war, peace and disarma
ment at the recent UN Special Session on Disarmament. She told the UN
General Assembly that it is aggressive nations, not weapons, that make war.
That weapons, nuclear or not, are the symptoms of aggressive behavior, not
the cause of war themselves. As one observer said, Mrs. Thatcher's remarks
were a "notable departure" from those of the 114 speakers who preceded her.
Here are excerpts from Mrs. Thatcher's address:
Discussion on disarmament inevitably turns to the weapons of war.
Our generation faces a special responsibility, because the march
of modern technology has made ever more deadly the weapons of
war •...However alarmed we are by those weapons, we cannot dis
invent them. The world cannot cancel the knowledge of how to
make them. It is an irreversible fact.
Mr. President [of the UN General Assembly], nuclear weapons must
be seen as deterrents. They contribute to what Winston Churchill
called "a balance of terror••••" These weapons succeed insofar as
they prevent war. And for
l1
years nuclear weapons have kept the
peace between East and West....
Of course we must look for a better system of preventing war than
nuclear deterrence. But to suggest that between East and West
there is such a system within reach at the present time would be a
perilous pretense•...The distinctive role of the nonnuclear coun
tries, I suggest, is to recognize that proliferation of nuclear
weapons cannot be the way to a safer world.
Nuclear weapons...may mask the facts about what we sometimes
call, too comfortably, conventional weapons and conventional war.
Since Nagasaki there have been no conflicts in which nuclear
weapons have been used.
But there have been something like 140
conflicts fought with conventional weapons; - ]:.!! which .!:!£ to--ro
million people have died.