ATOMIC ENERGY MINISTER THREATENS WEST OVER NATO EXPANSION.

Moscow will respond to NATO’s expansion into eastern Europe and the deployment there of tactical nuclear weapons by destroying the sites where they are based, Russia’s atomic energy minister declared February 15. In what was described as an "unprompted, Cold War-style diatribe," Viktor Mikhailov told two American reporters that the decision to expand into Eastern Europe "means that you are officially carrying out a policy of nuclear weapons proliferation." Mikhailov was accompanying Boris Yeltsin during the president’s trip to Yekaterinburg. The Russian Security Council member also dismissed U.S. objections to Moscow’s contract to sell nuclear reactor technology to Iran, criticized a January 29 U.S. newspaper report alleging that Moscow might be cheating on a deal to sell enriched uranium to the United States, and said that the United States had no right to arm its submarines with multiple warhead strategic nuclear weapons. (6)

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