§ Mr. Nicholas Wintertonasked the Secretary of State for Defence if he will make a statement on his recent talks with NATO defence Ministers at Brussels.
§ Mr. MulleyThe ministerial meetings of the Eurogroup and Defence Planning Committee were held on 6th and 7th-8th December respectively. The meetings were constructive and useful, and I have arranged for copies of the final commun iques to be placed in the Library.
§ Mr. Nicholas Wintertonasked the Secretary of State for Defence if he will make a statement on NATO negotiations with the Warsaw Pact regarding mutual and balanced force reductions.
§ Mr. MulleyThe talks between members of the Atlantic Alliance and the Warsaw Pact on mutual and balanced force reductions opened in October 1973 and have continued steadily, though without yet establishing a basis for agreement. There remains a fundamental difference of approach between the two sides. The West is concerned with correcting the present imbalance in central Europe, caused by the East's preponderance in ground manpower and main battle tanks, and has proposed parity in the form of a common ceiling on both sides' manpower. In contrast, the Warsaw Pact insists on equality of reductions by all participants, an approach which would give contractual effect to the existing imbalance in its favour. In December last year, in an important effort to secure Eastern agreement to its common ceiling approach, the West made certain additional proposals including an offer to withdraw certain U.S. nuclear weapons from the area under consideration in the talks. Unfortunately the East has so fat shown no evidence of its willingness to undertake reductions of a kind which would produce an outcome of parity.