For the Record

Surprise winner at Reykjavik turns out to be Strategic Defense Initiative. Post-Summit NBC poll showed 72 per cent believe President was right to stand firm on SDI. Subsequent NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll found that 55 per cent thought it was important to elect pro-SDI congressmen. Said political analyst Kevin Phillips: “Gorbachev and the Democratic Party have both seriously miscalculated on SDI.” Newsweek found that 30 per cent were more inclined, post Reykjavik, to vote for a candidate who supports SDI, only 13 per cent were less likely to do so. . . . Public support for Space Shield is up 12 points, to 74 per cent, from early fall, says Reagan’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin. . . . Republican pollster Robert Teeter, the week before elections, felt that it might mean a gain of at least a couple of percentage points for Republican candidates. … In Colorado it became central issue between conservative Ken Kramer and liberal Tim Wirth in that down-to-the-wire race to succeed anti-SDI Gary Hart in the Senate. It was noted that Wirth was no longer calling SDI a “cockamamie Star Wars scheme.” . . . Poll taken for Union of Concerned Scientists shows that while physicists oppose deployment of SDI by nearly 2 to 1, they favor basic laboratory research by a bigger margin. Says Dr. Phillip Schewe of American Institute of Physicists: “I don’t think most physicists want it, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t do the laboratory work” (and, incidentally, cash in on those lucrative federal grants).

As it turns out, our NATO Allies didn’t really care on what grounds disarmament talks were broken off, so long as they were ended. Commented West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, “Reykjavik was broken off at the right time.” . . . Said French Foreign Minister Jean-Bernard Raimond: “[The very idea of] the total disappearance of American missiles from Europe [is] terrible.” . . . British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand issued a joint statement stressing NATO’s continuing need for nuclear weapons. . . . And NATO’s Lord Carrington spelled it out. The zero-option proposal, he said, would leave Western Europe vulnerable to the Soviet Union’s short-range nuclear missiles, which were not covered in the proposed agreements—the estimated three hundred SS-21s, SS-22s, and SS-23s it installed in East Germany and Czechoslovakia after the deployment of the U.S. cruise and Pershing II missiles.

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Surprise winner at Reykjavik turns out to be Strategic Defense Initiative. Post-Summit NBC poll showed 72 per cent believe President was right to stand firm on SDI. Subsequent NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll found that 55 per cent thought it was important to elect pro-SDI congressmen. Said political analyst Kevin Phillips: “Gorbachev and the Democratic Party have both seriously miscalculated on SDI.” Newsweek found that 30 per cent were more inclined, post Reykjavik, to vote for a candidate who supports SDI, only 13 per cent were less likely to do so. . . . Public support for Space Shield is up 12 points, to 74 per cent, from early fall, says Reagan’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin. . . . Republican pollster Robert Teeter, the week before elections, felt that it might mean a gain of at least a couple of percentage points for Republican candidates. … In Colorado it became central issue between conservative Ken Kramer and liberal Tim Wirth in that down-to-the-wire race to succeed anti-SDI Gary Hart in the Senate. It was noted that Wirth was no longer calling SDI a “cockamamie Star Wars scheme.” . . . Poll taken for Union of Concerned Scientists shows that while physicists oppose deployment of SDI by nearly 2 to 1, they favor basic laboratory research by a bigger margin. Says Dr. Phillip Schewe of American Institute of Physicists: “I don’t think most physicists want it, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t do the laboratory work” (and, incidentally, cash in on those lucrative federal grants).

As it turns out, our NATO Allies didn’t really care on what grounds disarmament talks were broken off, so long as they were ended. Commented West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, “Reykjavik was broken off at the right time.” . . . Said French Foreign Minister Jean-Bernard Raimond: “[The very idea of] the total disappearance of American missiles from Europe [is] terrible.” . . . British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand issued a joint statement stressing NATO’s continuing need for nuclear weapons. . . . And NATO’s Lord Carrington spelled it out. The zero-option proposal, he said, would leave Western Europe vulnerable to the Soviet Union’s short-range nuclear missiles, which were not covered in the proposed agreements—the estimated three hundred SS-21s, SS-22s, and SS-23s it installed in East Germany and Czechoslovakia after the deployment of the U.S. cruise and Pershing II missiles.