Word: nato
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...first of several scandals occurred when Defense Minister Robert Coates was forced to resign after an Ottawa newspaper revealed that he had visited a West German strip club during a tour of NATO installations and shared a drink with a woman who described herself as an "exotic dancer." Fisheries Minister John Fraser resigned early last September in the furor that followed a television program's disclosure that he had allowed tainted tuna to be sold to Canadian consumers. And a few days later, Communications Minister Marcel Masse had to leave the Cabinet (he has since returned) while the Royal Canadian...
...weapons. The problems are obvious: agreement would be required not only from Britain and France but from China, the other known member of the "nuclear club" and a nation that has so far refused to join any nuclear negotiations. An even stickier problem is that the U.S. and its NATO allies depend on nuclear weapons to deter the Soviets from attacking or threatening Western Europe. The Warsaw Pact has a hefty superiority in ground troops and conventional weapons...
Only a week before the election, most polls had predicted that González would go down to a crushing defeat in the vote and be forced to make Spain the first country to withdraw totally from the 16-member alliance. But when the votes were counted, the pro-NATO group had won by a surprisingly large margin. The final tally showed 52.5% for continued membership, 39.8% for withdrawal, and the rest of the ballots blank or invalid...
González called the vote a "triumph for the Spanish people." It was also a triumph for González. He had taken office in 1982 on an anti-NATO platform, but then changed his mind and supported continued Spanish membership. During the campaign, he hinted that he would resign and call early elections if he lost. "I always said that the final result depended on Felipe's final address, and I wasn't far wrong," said Foreign Ministry Spokesman Inocencio Arias. After lying low for much of the prevoting skirmishes, González pulled out all the stops in the last...
Even so, to many the effort seemed hopeless only two weeks ago. Anti-NATO activists were attracting hundreds of thousands to rallies. Also, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, head of the Popular Alliance, the main conservative opposition party, urged people to abstain, claiming the referendum was just a political ploy by the Socialists. One prominent voter who ignored the boycott was popular King Juan Carlos, who said he was doing his "civic duty" when he and Queen Sofia cast ballots amid television cameras at a school near their Madrid palace. The King does not vote in municipal and general elections so that...