University Daily Kansan / Tuesday, July 3, 1990
Nation/World
7
NATO reviews policy
Bush wants less reliance on nuclear weapons
By Barry Schweld The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Bush this week will urge the NATO allies to overhaul their strategy for repelling a Soviet invasion by making the use of nuclear weapons a highly unlikely resort, U.S. officials said yesterday.
Bush also is ready to consider scraping the 1,470 U.S. nuclear-ripped artillery shells now based mostly in West Germany and reducing or eliminating an arsenal of 1,560 U.S. nuclear bombs deployed in seven NATO countries, the officials said.
The shift in nuclear policy is prompted by a vastly reduced Soviet threat and the crumbling of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. One official said Hungary, once a rested Soviet ally, is seeking an affiliation with NATO and that the Bush administration welcomes the move.
The proposed changes in NATO doctrine would not strip the Western alliance of all nuclear weapons. In fact, the Bush administration has made a point in its arms control talks with the Soviets to clear the way for production of a new short-range nuclear weapon, the air-to-surface TASS.
But the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in a series of interviews, stressed that the likelihood of an attack by the Soviet Army and other Warpact forces, or one that NATO could back only with its weapons, was becoming very remote.
As a result, NATO is reviewing its strategy. Some of the results are likely to appear in the communique that will be issued at the end of the summit on Friday. Others, officials said, will be implemented in the field with the pace partly determined by what the East does about its forces.
Views about the shift in NATO thinking vary among the allies. Britain and France are the least inclined to relax the nuclear deterrent, while West Germany, Italy and the Scandinavian countries want to de-emphasize nuclear weapons without abandoning them, an official said.
That places Bush somewhere in the middle of the debate, but also prepared to scrub the concept of early NATO attack. The NATO is attacked, the officials said.
That theory was adopted in the 1960s over the opposition of Robert McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It was also adopted in NATO's forces are incapable of halting an invasion by the Warsaw
Pact, which has a 2-to-1 preponderance in tanks and artillery.
But now Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev says he is committed to withdrawing tens of thousands of tanks and troops from Eastern and Western Europe, where countries in the Warsaw Pact are gradually leaving the Soviet orbit.
Meanwhile, NATO and the WarsaPact are in the midst of negotiating a treaty in Vienna that would limit Soviet troops in Europe to 195,000 and U.S. troops to 225,000, and set cellings against Russia into categories of non-nuclear weapons.
Bush responded in May by abandoning plans to replace the 88 U.S. short-range Lance nuclear missile launchers in West Germany, the Netherlands and Italy with a more powerful version.
Now, according to the officials,
he is ready to withdraw the 1,350
nuclear-tipped artillery shells
deployed in West Germany and 128
others based in Germany, Turkey
and Italy, if the allies concur.
The weapons have a range of 10 to 20 miles. East Germany, the potential target of the nuclear arsenal in Iraq, has joined Iran in merging with its Western neighbor,
"The shells are a dead duck," said a U.S. official.
Life and death decisions made after Cruzan ruling
WASHINGTON — Since the Supreme Court's right-to-die ruling, U.S. citizens by the thousands have begun beheading the advice of physicians, lawyers and death-with-dignity advocates to draft a "living will."
The Associated Press
"We've had to get volunteers to help us man the phone lines," said Doron Weber, a spokesman for the Society for the Right to Die. "That's the magic word right now — living wills."
Living wills allow people to spell out in writing how much medical care, if any, they would like to have in the event they ever become critically or terminally ill and are unable to speak for themselves.
The urgency of such advance planning was brought home last week when the Supreme Court barred the parents of a 32-year-old comatose woman, Nancy Hirschmann, removal of the feeding tube that is keeping her alive.
Doctors said the Missouri woman was irreversibly unconscious, in a permanent vegetative state that could last for years. Her parents wanted to have her feeding tube removed, but the court said no.
The court said states could block family members from ending the lives of permanently comatose relatives who had not made their wishes known.
"This decision affects just about every member of our society." Weber said.
The American Medical Association estimated that 70 percent of all people would be involved in some way at some time in a decision of whether to prolong or terminate life support.
The Society for the Right to Die has become a sort of
national clearinghouse for living wills.
"We're getting thousands of calls every day, the vast majority from individuals who want living wills."
The Society for the Right to Die distributes the appropriate forms for the 41 states and the District of Columbia.
For people in the nine states that don't have a law, the society has general forms. Those state are Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and South Dakota.
For people in all states, however, the society advises that individuals be as specific as possible.
"It's a very important document," Weber said.
"You should say everything you want to say, whatever your personal instructions are . . . You have to make your wishes known."
interested in the issue was lively even before the ruling in the Cruz case. Before last week's decision, the American Association of Retired Persons had received more than 100,000 requests for its booklet "Health Care Powers of Attorney," produced by the American Bar Association.
The American Bar Association approves of living wills, but recommends that people also give someone they trust what is called durable health care power of attorney.
This is done in a written document and gives the person named the authority to make health care decisions for an individual in the event that individual becomes unable to speak for himself or herself.
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