Memo to File - Lunch with Martin Kaplan - Monday, April 30, 1979

 

Martin is attending the UNCTAD preparatory meetings
representing WHO. I should point him out to Rod Nichols
if he's still attending this week.

Martin simply briefed me about recent activities of
Pugwash especially vis-a-vis using Pugwash as an informal
vehicle for USSR-China communications. There was a Russian
initiative to try to get a Pugwash statement condemning
Vietnam for the invasion of Cambodia and this eventually
flowered with the remarkable agreement from both Moscow
and Peking that they would be willing to have Pugwash get
together under certain conditions. This will include having
both Vietnam and Cambodia also represented which does not
seem too likely and probably won't be forthcoming. But the
further background is that there may finally be a sense
of need for a channel for informal discussion on arms con-
trol related questions since many of the other ones have
dried up as between Moscow and Peking. There may well be
a meeting in London later on this year that would reflect
those possibilities. I urged Martin to be in good touch
with John Lewis and the Stanford group for background in-
formation on how Chinese scientists relate to foreign policy
formation over there. |

Martin was also concerned about the upcoming review of
the BW Treaty. I expressed my concern that the problematics
of verification might surface. There has not been a shread

of satisfaction with respect to any Soviet moves in compliance
with the treaty and he was well acquainted with suspicious
satellite observations that had not been properly explained.
However, he told me that he was quite confident that the
suspect plant that the French had built near Moscow was in-
deed for hoof and mouth vaccine and that at least during its
construction there was fairly easy French access into it.
However that is no longer the case and it is very difficult

to know whether the security is entirely for animal quarantine
purposes. In addition as I pointed out to Martin hoof and
mouth would be an ideal candidate as an economic weapon and
how in the world could one ever distinguish vaccine production
from BW weapons development. I suspect that if no one else

on the committee for the present danger is going to raise those
kinds of questions on the occasion of the five year review of
the treaty and that it might be a good idea to try to spark
some technical response how to answer such issues.

The last session of the CCD in Geneva has adjourned with-
out there being any visible progress on CW and this is likely
to remain the case as long as there is such an impasse as
far as verification is concerned. However neither of us frets
too much about that since it is not an issue of the same im-
portance as the nuclear one. -I did suggest that they think
a little bit about carving out arms transfer in the CW area

as something that could be subject to mutual prohibition without

worrying too much about verification.
Martin also told me that there had been some allega-
tions that the Vietnamese had used chemical weapons during
their invasion of Cambodia. There were some press
reports about that. Mikulik might well have some of that
background but Martin might send it to me as well. That
is probably a propaganda fabrication. There was some ref-
erence to yperite which is a most unlikely candidate!

I mentioned my concerns about refugees to Martin al-
though not sure that this has much more than a domestic
reference with the headaches that we are going to face trying
to set up a sensible policy on how to open our border to
Mexico. He mentioned that the Club of Rome and the Interna-
tional Council of Jurists might be very appropriate media
for such further discussions. With respect to the latter
he gave me the names of Neal McDermott and Paul Sighart in

London. I probably should pass those on to the person from

a

Aspen.

Finally I reinvented the wheel suggesting that Pugwash
set up summer courses on Strategic policy and arms control
with more emphasis on the former than usually pertains. I
told him that I had had some concern at Stanford that we did
not have sufficient education with respect to basic military
needs that made it more difficult to press the case for
rational arms control where that could be brought in. It
may be recalled that we had tried to recruit Admiral Zumwalt
for that situation but that those negotiations broke down when

the Admiral decided to run for the Senate and it was obviously
quite impossible to do that simultaneously with teaching
at Stanford. What he did mention was that Scherf has been
running a biennial program under the Italian arms control
group. There will be another one in the summer of 1980
and this is one to watch to see if there are some people
from here who might be interested in attending. He will

send me the announcements of it.