How US helped Thatcher

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It's easier be resolute' with the Pentagon behind you... difficulties no more) than it expected."

The most common uses of microprocessors are relatively simple ones, fur example in computer-controlled machine tools.

The report, from the Policy Studies Institute, estimates the loss of jobs due to micros at no higher than 35,000.

THE Department of Trade and Industry has just published figures for the stock of British direct investment abroad.

It makes the total £44 billion. About one-third of this total is in the US, and about 20% in the EEC.

Most of the rest is in other advanced capitalist countries. Canada and Australia foremost among them _ and about 20% is in Third World countries.

The stock of direct investment from abroad into Britain is estimated at £29 million.

A FOOTNOTE to the item two weeks ago on Third Worldbased muitinationals: a recent Financial Times survey lists the worid's top 30 international construction companies.

13 of the 30 are US-based, 10 EEC-based, and two Japanese. But there are five giants based outside the capitalist metropolises: three South Korean firms, one Turkish, and one Greek are in the top 30.

One South Korean firm, Daewoo, has just bought up Hymac, a bankrupt South Wales manufacturer of hydraulic excavators.

To join or affiliate write to Chris Richardson, 21 Devonshire Promenade, Lenton, Nottingham NG7 2DS ACCORDING to an article in the latest issue of the 'Economist' magazine, US aid to Thatcher's war over the Falklands was much greater than publicly revealed.

The US's motive, according to the magazine, was not simple.

"Given the Reagan administration's carefully nurtured rapprochement with Latin America, there was a clear foreign policy motive for neutrality...

"Both President Reagan and Mr Haig had privately told Mrs Thatcher that, if negotiation failed, public opinion would force them back to Britain. But that only increased their anger at Britain's fixation with what President Reagan termed a little icecold bunch of land down there' "If foreign policy considerations led Washington strongly in the direction of non-involvement, so too did global strategic ones. The Falklands were not just irrelevant to NATO but a distraction from it...

"The [US] decision to "tilt' Britain's way on May 1 was therefore bitterly contested by certain State Department and Pentagon officials...

But for the majority in US ruling circles, once the contlict was on, there could be no choice but to back Britain - the US's number one military ally against the shaky and unreliable Argentine regime.

If necessary, the US government was ready to help publicly on a large scale. it offered to lend a US ship to the British navy if either of the two British aircraft carriers was put out of action.

But that was a risky last resort. The US's chief aim now was that Britain "win soon and without American help being too conspicuous". • So it poured in masses of behind-the-scenes aid.

On Ascension Island, "additional accommodation and water purification plants were supplied. Roads were repaired and fuel pipelines built. An astonishing 12.5 million gallons of aviation fuel were diverted for British use"

Weapons for the British forces - notably Sidewinder missiles -were also sent to Ascension Island. The Economist reports an estimate that at one stage Wideawake Airport on Ascension Island became the busiest airport in the world!

Maybe even more importantly, a US military satellite was moved from watching the USSR to watching Argentina. «The Americans claim '98% of British intelligence of Argentine movements came from them"

Throughout all this the US JOHN HARRIS had not changed its views on the rights and wrongs of the issue -it remained, and remains, neutral on the question of sovereignty over the island. But world power politics calculations were more important to the US than rights and wrongs ... and much more important than the human lives lost in the war.

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