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QUESTION
Prime Minister, there seems to have been a
distinction drawn by your Government between support for
research of space defence systems and support for testing
or eventual deployment of such systems. The Administration,
through its spokes-people has made it clear, and through the
Secretary of Defence, that it supports both those concepts,
eventual deployment and support for testing as well as
research. Do you support both, or just research?
PRIME MINISTER
I think you will find that question is dealt with in
the four points which I gave you.
First, you have to do the research as
atter of
balance. I indicated that the Soviet Union has already done
some research and, indeed, she has already got an anti-satellite
satellite capability and, as you know, she has done a great
deal of research on lasers and electronic pulse beams, and also,
as you know, she appears to have some very special radars and
has not, in fact, let us have the results of some of her
nuclear testing, in accordance with agreement. So she has
gone ahead on some of these matters and United States has to
do research as a matter of balance, otherwise the Soviet Union
would get ahead.
If the
Now, research is within existing agreements.
result of research is such that it is decided to go ahead with
production and deployment, that has to be a matter for
negotiation before those deployments could take place, because