Nuclear strategy and competition are moving toward a new era, driven by President Reagan’s vision of defensive systems to render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” Mr. Reagan’s vision is assaulting the core of nuclear philosophy — deterrence based on the threat of retaliation. He and his senior aides are saying that the 40 years of nuclear peace built on that threat cannot last and is immoral. Most experts think that decades of research might be required before they know with confidence whether the vision can be translated into workable technology. Yet proponents and critics alike are well aware that the vision itself, along with accelerated research programs and the attending debates, is shaking the foundations of American military policy – strategic doctrine, the shape of military spending, alliance relations and arms control.
Local branches of the British coal miners’ union held nationwide meetings to decide how to instruct their delegates to vote at a special conference in London today on whether the miners should return to work without a negotiated settlement. The National Coal Board, the employer in the nationalized industry, has said roughly half the miners have gone back to work in defiance of the almost year-long strike. The union’s militant president, Arthur Scargill, called the conference to make “a decision in the best interests of our members.”
Union chiefs in Britain’s biggest coalfield defied demands from miners in almost every other region today and refused to support an end to their 51-week-old strike. Leaders of Yorkshire’s 50,000 miners resolved to fight on until the state-run National Coal Board granted an amnesty to 700 men dismissed in the dispute over pit closures. A bitter debate is expected here Sunday when delegates of the National Union of Mineworkers meet to decide the future of the strike. Six coalfields and other miners’ groups have called for a return to work in the face of a Coal Board refusal to negotiate and a drift back to the pits by thousands of men. Leaders of North Derbyshire’s 10,500 miners and of 7,200 pit mechanics in northeast England today joined the call today. The Yorkshire decision tacitly acknowledged that the strike had lost its original cause — resistance to a Coal Board plan to shut 20 money-losing pits and eliminate 20,000 jobs
The leaders of the Greek and Turkish parts of this divided island indicated this week that they are looking to the United States to give new impetus to the search for a solution to the Cyprus problem. Talks at the United Nations under the auspices of the Secretary General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, broke down in January, and today President Spyros Kyprianou said in an interview: “I don’t see what he can do alone. He needs the support of governments that can influence Turkey. The United States is in a better position than the others.
The Polish military attaché who was ordered out of the United States this week returned home today, charging that his expulsion was an act of revenge. “My expulsion is another step of the policy against Poland, that is the policy of pressure, interference and force,” the attaché, Colonel Zygmunt Szymanski, told reporters. “I think it is an act of revenge by U.S. authorities.” The United States ordered his expulsion on Monday, just hours after Poland accused the American military attaché in Warsaw of spying and gave him 48 hours to leave the country. The Polish authorities said they had caught the American, Colonel Frederick Myer, taking photographs in a restricted military area on February 21.
An Armenian militant was sentenced to life imprisonment in France, and two others received sentences of 10 and 15 years for their roles in a terrorist bombing at Paris’ Orly Airport two years ago that killed eight people and injured 56. Waroujan Garbidian was described by the prosecution as the mastermind behind the bombing at the airport’s Turkish Airlines desk in July, 1983. Garbidian, 31, is a self-confessed member of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, a violently anti-Turkish terrorist group.
A former Norwegian diplomat, Arne Treholt, on trial in Oslo for espionage, said he passed documents to a Soviet KGB agent while he served at his country’s U.N. mission. According to prosecutor Lars Qvigstad, Treholt told investigators last year that he met repeatedly with Soviet agent Vladimir Zjizjin at the United Nations and at a number of New York City restaurants in 1981. However, Treholt admitted that he lied in saying Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko expressed pleasure over the information he provided.
An avalanche roared down on a car and a minibus on an Alpine road leading to the Swiss resort town of Zermatt, near the Matterhorn, killing at least eight people. Rescue officials called it the worst such Swiss disaster in 15 years and expressed fear that more victims are trapped under the snow. A search by dozens of rescuers and dogs was halted shortly before nightfall because of the danger of new snow slides.
Israel staged it largest raid in its crackdown against Shiite Muslim strongholds in southern Lebanon, according to reports received in Beirut. An Israeli force estimated at 800 soldiers converged from three directions on Marakah, an isolated hilltop village east of Tyre, at about 8:30 A.M., according to sources with the United Nations peacekeeping force in the area. They said the columns were supported by 3 tanks, 50 armored personnel carriers, 2 bulldozers and 30 other vehicles. One Lebanese was killed “evading capture,” Israeli officials said tonight, and three houses were destroyed. Another house was bulldozed in the nearby village of Teir Dibba, witnesses said.
Yasser Arafat stood by his agreement with Jordan. He said he was firmly committed to it and was working with Egypt on other ideas for peace. But, in an interview, Mr. Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, denounced the United States for what he termed its “shameful response” to the agreement and its “hypocritical” refusal to recognize the P.L.O.
Pakistani President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq announced planned amendments to the Constitution today that would give him sweeping powers and establish a watchdog National Security Council. General Zia said that the suspended 1973 Constitution would be restored in stages as martial law is progressively relaxed but that under his amendments the political system would be changed from a parliamentary to a largely presidential one. He did not give a deadline for restoring the Constitution or abolishing martial law, saying only that the National Assembly and the Senate would meet on March 23, “and thus democratic institutions will be established.” The National Assembly elected last Monday would be able to reject the amendments, but only with a two-thirds majority and support from the four provincial assemblies elected Thursday.
South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan decreed a special amnesty today for 2,821 prisoners on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of his inauguration. Official sources said all of those granted amnesty were common criminals and not political prisoners. Information Minister Lee Won Hong said the amnesty measure was taken “to expand the scope of reconciliation” so those affected could “actively participate in national construction.” Of the total to be freed, 1,615 were pardoned, 512 had their prison terms reduced and 694 were paroled, the government announcement said.
President Reagan’s decision not to press Japan to extend its auto export quotas left Japanese car manufacturers and Government officials uncertain today over how to exercise their new power. In a stream of enthusiastic statements after the American announcement on Friday, Government leaders and auto executives hailed the end of the quotas, which they had denounced since their imposition in 1981. At the same time, they pledged not to flood the United States market with Japanese cars. All day today, officials of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry were locked in meetings, trying to decide how to fulfill that commitment. Keijiro Murata, the Minister of International Trade and Industry, said: “It would be undesirable to have torrential auto exports after the discontinuation of the present auto export restraints. It is important for our auto markets to exercise moderation in shipping their products to the United States.” His comments were echoed by Takao Fujinami, the chief Government spokesman, who called on automakers to be “prudent.”
Five alleged drug traffickers and a Mexican policeman died when Mexican narcotics agents raided a ranch where they believed a kidnaped U.S. drug agent was being held near Guadalajara, police said in Mexico City. Federal police engaged in a shootout with the suspects during a search for U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena, who was abducted February 7 in Guadalajara. But Camarena was not found in the raid. Jose Manuel Esquivel Jiminez, a Mexican federal narcotics agent, was killed in the hourlong exchange, sustaining 13 rifle wounds.
General John R. Galvin took over as head of the U.S. Southern Command during a ceremony in Panama City. Galvin, 55, replaces General Paul F. Gorman in the post, the highest-ranking U.S. military position in Latin America. Galvin last served in West Germany as commanding general of the 7th Army Corps in Europe.
Resumption of the peace efforts in Central America of the Contadora group was backed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz following a meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay, with President Daniel Ortega Saavedra of Nicaragua. Mr. Shultz said that “perhaps there is the recognition all round that the center of negotiation must be the Contadora process and that the sooner everyone gets back to that process the better.” The work of the Contadora group, which consists of Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama, was interrupted earlier this year by a dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua over a Nicaraguan youth who was arrested December 24 after taking asylum in the Costa Rican Embassy in Managua.
Black townships in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, were surrounded by thousands of troops and policemen in a huge search for arms and anti-Government dissidents. About 400,000 people live in the townships. Zimbabwe opposition leader Joshua Nkomo went into hiding in the southern city of Bulawayo following a massive army and police operation to flush out anti-government rebels in the city’s black townships, officials said. More than 4,000 soldiers and police sealed off the suburbs and began house-to-house searches. Nkomo, leader of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, went to a “safe house” in another part of the city, his aides said. The sweep forced cancellation of a burial service for six opposition party officials, five of whom were killed by gunmen in the western town of Hwange.
President Reagan makes a Radio Address to the Nation on the 1986 budget. The President attacked Democrats, farm state legislators, businessmen, educators and mayors critical of his attempts to cut domestic spending. In his weekly radio speech, Mr. Reagan urged Congress to muster the “political courage” to approve his budget and said he strongly opposed efforts in Congress to restrain military spending. “As long as I’m President,” Mr. Reagan said, “we’re not going back to the days when America was becoming an impotent democracy, too weak to meet defense commitments or to resist Communist takeovers and, yes, too weak to stop a Federal spending machine from impovershing families and destroying our economy with runaway taxes and inflation.” Mr. Reagan’s sharply worded criticisms reflected White House uncertainty on the fate of the President’s plan to reduce the Federal deficit by killing more than two dozen subsidy programs and freezing the rest of the nonmilitary budget.
President Reagan spends the day at the White House answering mail.
An ELISA screening test for AIDS antibodies was licensed by the Government for commercial production and will be widely available in two to six weeks, health officials said. Margaret M. Heckler, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said the test was not meant as a diagnostic tool for AIDS and was developed to screen blood for antibodies to the AIDS virus. People who take the test and are found to have the antibodies will not be allowed to donate blood. Health officials said that thus far 113 cases of AIDS had been linked to blood or blood products. As of February 18, the Centers for Disease Control reported the United States had 8,495 cases of AIDS, an illness that breaks down the body’s ability to fight off disorder.
Former Interior Secretary James G. Watt declared that President Reagan’s second-term mandate is being lost and that “the liberals still control the Establishment of this country.” Watt told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington that the Republican-controlled Senate, in electing Robert J. Dole of Kansas as majority leader, “elected a leadership not committed to the revolution that had been commenced and re-endorsed in 1984…”
A Senate committee passed a bill that would add $2.2 billion to the Reagan Administration’s funding request for the Superfund dump-cleanup program. The bill, approved by the Environment and Public Works Committee on a 13-1 vote, would authorize the Superfund program to spend $7.5 billion over the next five years, compared to the Administration proposal of $5.3 billion. The committee added two other provisions opposed by the Administration, one to establish a project to compensate victims of toxic wastes in abandoned dumps and one to permit anybody to sue the government to carry out provisions of the Superfund law.
Subway vigilante Bernhard H. Goetz is losing support the more he talks about the December shootings of four teen-agers, New York Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward said. “He just kind of reminds me of someone who’s digging a very deep hole. At some point the sides are going to collapse on him and we are going to find out a lot more about Bernhard Goetz than maybe we knew in the past,” Ward told WNBC-TV. A Daily NewsABC poll taken two months ago showed that 49% of New Yorkers supported Goetz. A new poll shows an increase in support to 51%. “But the second poll shows that fewer New Yorkers now believe Goetz acted in self-defense-though barely more than half believe he was justified,” the News said.
Comparable worth — the doctrine seeking pay equality between men and women if their jobs, though different, are of similar difficulty and skill levels — was denounced by the Administration’s chief civil rights enforcer as an instrument for “redistribution of wages.” “Comparable worth is a theory which has as its central aim solely to accomplish a redistribution of wages and salaries in this country along gender lines…” Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told a symposium at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Pan American World Airways concentrated on maintaining half of its international flights, having dropped virtually all domestic service in a strike by 19,000 employees. The striking Transport Workers Union predicted that a long strike would drive the airline out of business, but Pan Am said it was operating a reduced schedule “successfully.” No new talks were set in the 3-day-old strike.
Murray P. Haydon, the third person to receive an artificial heart, was taken back to surgery this evening for a one- and-a-half hour operation in which doctors identified a point in a remnant of his natural heart as the source of bleeding in his chest. Mr. Haydon was listed in critical but stable condition after the surgery in which a team headed by Dr. William C. DeVries traced the bleeding to a small hole left by a monitoring tube that they had removed on Tuesday. Dr. DeVries sewed shut the hole, which was described as the width of the graphite in a pencil, in the right atrium, or the upper chamber of the heart. Both atria had been left in place to serve as anchors for the artificial heart.
A Dallas woman has died of a heart attack she suffered in an ambulance that stopped on the way to the hospital so the driver, whose shift was ending, could be relieved, officials said. The woman, Laverne Allen, 57 years old, died Friday. She had been in a hospital since February 14, after she suffered a heart attack in the ambulance. Mrs. Allen’s daughter, Patricia Finch, said she telephoned for help when her mother became ill but the ambulance driver who answered her call did not use his siren or flashing lights and instead of going straight to the hospital stopped at a fire station because his shift had ended. There was a four-minute delay before a new driver took over. The first driver was dismissed last Monday. Mrs. Allen’s heart attack came 13 months after Lillian Boff, 60, died of a heart attack when her stepson called for an ambulance but could not persuade a Dallas dispatcher to send one.
The video cassette recorder is changing the way millions of Americans use their leisure time. Experts say it has brought about the most fundamental change in the way Americans enjoy filmed entertainment since the postwar expansion of commercial television.
Emery Mining Corporation crews have opened a second sealed portal of the burning Wilberg Mine in Utah and have started spraying nitrogen foam inside to extinguish fires smoldering in coal seams. The mine was sealed to shut off oxygen shortly after fire broke out on December 19, killing 27 miners. Their bodies have not been recovered.
Senator Jesse Helms, whose conservative followers are trying to take control of CBS, says his “good friend” Ted Turner, the Atlanta broadcasting executive, asked his blessing before preparing his own takeover attempt. The North Carolina Senator says he has written to a million conservatives to use their savings to buy CBS stock and “become Dan Rather’s boss.”
The Minnesota Senate passed a $25 million bill Friday to provide interest subsidies to financially pressed farmers, who are also calling for a ban on mortgage foreclosures. The Republican-controlled House was expected to adopt the interest aid bill to stall a bill sponsored by Senator Charles Berg, a disaffected Republican, that provides a one-year moratorium on mortgate foreclosures. The moratorium was passed by Senate Democrats in January. Under the loan plan, a farmer who has debts at least equal to assets could get a loan with interest varying from 7 percent to 10 percent. Most farm operating loans are written at 14 percent. For every $1 a banker loses in interest on such loans, the state would pay $2.
The mother of three daughters in Miami who the police say were repeatedly raped by their stepfather over a six-year period was jailed today for not telling the authorities about the incidents. The mother, Veronica Hinds, 38 years old, was jailed on three counts of child abuse. Her husband, Alexander Crawford, was held without bond on three counts of sexual battery.
Frontier Airlines employees and four investment groups have formally offered to buy the financially distressed airline’s outstanding common stock for $16 a share, or more than $200 million, a spokesman said today. Will McFarlane, spokesman for Frates Enterprises of Tulsa, Oklahoma, said an acquisition group had been formed to make the offer, which was delivered Friday to M. C. Lund, president of Frontier.
Americans paid an extra $1.3 billion to heat their homes in January, battling below-normal temperatures during one of the coldest months on record, government weather experts report. Temperatures 2 to 12 degrees below normal over almost all of the country produced the eighth-greatest temperature-related heating demand nationally since 1932, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
A windy snowstorm gathered strength over the northern Rockies, bringing heavy snowfall that closed two airports in Idaho. A winter storm warning was issued for much of southern and western Montana, northern Wyoming and parts of Utah, with a winter storm watch issued for northern Arizona. Meanwhile, conditions were seasonal and sunny in the East. Boston tied a record for the date with a high of 60, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, set a record with 60.
Motion picture and television script writers on the West Coast have rejected a contract proposed by producers and will strike Tuesday, the Writers Guild of America said today. The vote Friday was 1,255 to 804 in favor of the strike. The guild has 9,200 members nationwide. Guild members in New York are to vote Monday. The main issue in negotiations has been the writers’ demand for a share of the income from video cassettes. A 1981 writer’s strike lasted three months. Executives have said that only a long strike would hurt major movie production, but television production would be hurt even by a brief walkout.
Born:
Reggie Bush, NCAA and NFL running back (Heisman Trophy, 2005 [later forfeited], USC; NFL Champions, Super Bowl 44-Saints, 2009, New Orleans Saints, Miami Dolphins, Detroit Lions, San Francisco 49ers, Buffalo Bills), in Spring Valley, California.
Will Beatty, NFL tackle (New York Giants), in York, Pennsylvania.
Bud Norris, MLB pitcher (Houston Astros, Baltimore Orioles, San Diego Padres, Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Angels, St. Louis Cardinals), in Greenbrae, California.
Brandon Wood, MLB third baseman, shortstop, and first baseman (Los Angeles Angels, Pittsburgh Pirates), in Austin, Texas.
Luke Pritchard, British rock singer and guitarist (The Kooks – Inside In/Inside Out), in Worthing, West Sussex, England, United Kingdom.
Died:
John Kelly Jr, 57, American rower (Olympic bronze single sculls 1956; president US Olympic Committee 1985) and brother of Grace Kelly.
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