The World - News from Feb. 2, 1987

Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard N. Perle described Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s proposal to abolish all nuclear weapons by the year 2000 as “dangerous nonsense.” He told an annual defense symposium of Atlantic Alliance countries in Munich, West Germany, that European members of the alliance were guilty of timidity in failing to reject Gorbachev’s “beguiling maneuvers” on arms control that would leave the alliance vulnerable to Soviet superiority in conventional forces. He said that Gorbachev’s proposal, made at last October’s Iceland summit, was calculated “to undermine the legitimacy of (nuclear) weapons that are vital to Western security.”