Word: schmidts
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...issue at stake is Bonn's support for a 1979 NATO decision to deploy 572 new U.S.-built intermediate-range nuclear missiles in five Western European countries, including West Germany, starting in late 1983. At the insistence of Schmidt and other Western European leaders, the alliance simultaneously called for negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which began in Geneva last November, with the goal of reducing the number of atomic weapons in Europe. The Europeans hoped that, if the U.S. could persuade Moscow to eliminate the 300 SS-20 missile launchers that could be aimed at Western...
...battery of motions opposing the Doppelbeschluss. The left's main hope is pinned on a proposal for a total freeze on all new NATO and Warsaw Pact intermediate-range missiles until the Geneva negotiations end. Says Erhard Eppler, a leader of the peace movement and one of Schmidt's main critics within the S.P.D.: "The two-track decision has one major fault. It is meant to pressure the Soviets, but not the Americans...
Moscow has been quick to take advantage of Schmidt's problems. Last month President Leonid Brezhnev announced that the Soviet Union had frozen its deployment of SS-20s, urging NATO to reverse its 1979 decision. President Reagan refused, arguing that a freeze would preserve the Soviet advantage...
Nearly half of the 22 regional party organizations have passed resolutions favoring the moratorium. Still, Schmidt's political advisers are confident that at least 60%, and possibly as many as 80%, of the delegates wih1 reject the idea. Their reasoning is that voting on the local motions usually took place late in the evening, when most rank-and-file party members had gone home to bed and only the left-wing intellectual activists remained behind. But at the congress left-wingers are outnumbered by the more conservative workers who form the party's backbone...
...Even if Schmidt has his way at the congress, he still faces serious challenges. According to a poll published last week, the Social Democrats would win only 33% of the vote if a national election were held now, vs. the 42.9% they won when Schmidt was re-elected Chancellor in 1980 as the head of a coalition. Schmidt was worried enough about such poll results to write a twelve-page article pleading for party unity. "For many citizens, our political contours have become unclear," he wrote. "It would be dangerous if we drove disillusioned voters in the center...