§ Lord Kennetasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they will provide details of the weapons systems they understand the Soviet Union have deployed:
as a purported response to the deployment in Western Europe of Pershing II and Cruise Missiles.
- (a) in Eastern Europe, and
- (b) in the Atlantic,
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces (Lord Trefgarne)Since the Soviet Union broke off the INF negotiations in November 1983 they have redeployed about 50 short range mobile SCALEBOARD missiles from the territory of the Soviet Union to bases in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and have increased deployment of their ballistic missile-carrying submarines off the coast of the USA.
§ Lord Kennetasked Her Majesty's Government:
Why, in a Written Answer on 25th April (Col. 123) they stated that it was not cost-effective to place in the Library certain information about Soviet naval exercises, and yet in an answer on 31st October (Col. 613) they stated that the cost of placing in the Library photocopies of US documents showing similar information "was negligible", given that the documents referred to in each case were sections of the unclassified document Soviet World-Wide Naval Exercise September 1983 produced by the Naval Intelligence Command of the US Navy.
§ Lord TrefgarneI will write to the noble Lord.