The World - News from Sept. 16, 1988

The Soviet Union should cut its two-year compulsory military service in half because it is not threatened with attack, human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov said in an interview with the Soviet weekly magazine New Times. Sakharov, according to the article, said the Kremlin should make the cut to reduce the size of the armed forces and use the resources elsewhere. “There is really not a single government which would threatened the U.S.S.R. with attack,” he said. “There isn’t! Even with a halving of the Soviet armed forces, this is absolutely excluded.”