Word: bonne
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...aides attended to last-minute details of Bush's itinerary, the whirlwind of activity over the missiles was already well under way in Europe. In Bonn, Paul Nitze, 76, the chief U.S. negotiator in the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks with the Soviet Union in Geneva, dropped hints of his own that the Administration was edging away from the zero proposal. After Nitze met with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Defense Minister Manfred Wōrner, a senior West German official said: "The word used most often by Nitze was flexibility, with balance spoken more softly afterward...
According to another top official in Bonn, Nitze told the West Germans that he had Reagan's authorization to pursue "all possibilities of balanced results." The official left the meeting with the distinct impression that one such possibility might be similar to the proposal that Nitze explored with his Soviet counterpart, Yuli A. Kvitsinsky, last summer. According to that scenario, later rejected by both Washington and Moscow, the U.S. would base 75 cruise missiles in Western Europe while the Soviet Union would pare its arsenal...
...departure, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher visited Washington for meetings with Reagan, the Vice President and other senior Administration officials. The visit, undertaken at Genscher's request, provided more hints that the U.S. might not hold to its present posture in Geneva. In exchange for Bonn's "firm support" of the zero proposal, Genscher too received American assurances of "flexibility...
...Geneva. The Soviets have deployed some 340 SS-20s in the past six years-a rate of more than one a week-scattered over 38 sites. Two-thirds are west of the Ural Mountains, pointing westward with at most a 20-min. flight to West Germany. Sums up a Bonn defense official: "There is no Soviet weapons system in its class that comes close to matching the SS-20." A compatriot in the Foreign Ministry agrees. "The SS-20," he says, "is a unique threat...
Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Kohl's Foreign Minister and the leader of the Free Democrats, in campaigning against Vogel declared that Bonn is not contemplating any change in the 1983 deployment date. But Genscher has also waffled on the deployment question. Addressing party officials, he went so far as to argue that an interim agreement was implicit in the initial "double-track" strategy adopted by NATO in 1979. Genscher said that the alliance could indeed stretch out deployment while talks continued...