Another busy day with far reaching implications; July 22, 1982.
The French government ordered a French company Thursday to supply US -developed technology for the new Soviet natural gas pipeline to Western Europe defying President Reagan’s boycott in a direct political and legal challenge to the United States. President Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist government said it “cannot accept the unilateral measures taken by the United States on June 18. The Reagan administration last month expanded sanctions on exports of oil and gas equipment to the Soviet Union to include equipment produced abroad under US licenses. The 4 sanctions are aimed at punishing the Soviets for their alleged role in the imposition of martial law in Poland the previous December’.
And after 16 months of controversy Interior Secretary James Watt gave final approval Wednesday to a program that will open virtually the entire US coastline to oil and gas drilling. Under the plan 1 billion acres will be offered for leasing in 41 sales to be held from August of this year through June 1987. Since Watt first proposed scrapping the old leasing plan prepared by the Carter administration he has been under attack from critics who charged that his plan was too ambitious and would jeopardize environmentally fragile coastal areas. Despite the outcry Watt refused to back down from the major thrust of his April 1981 proposal — making entire “planning areas” available for leasing In the past leases have covered about 2 million acres each but a planning area covers about 133 million acres Critics said such areas were too large to make proper assessments of the potential harm to marine life and would result in leasing environmentally sensitive tracts.
Finally – Reagan administration officials remained cautiously optimistic yesterday that the new plan for evacuating Palestine Liberation Organization members from West Beirut would work. While publicly adopting a wait-and-see posture, officials said off the record they expected the PLO’s attitude over the next few days, as one ppt it, “to undergo an organic change.” “I think the PLO is becoming more realistic. They don’t want a final Israeli assault,” said an official closely involved with the crisis. The PLO has demanded an Israeli withdrawal from Beirut and installation of an international peacekeeping force before it will itself withdraw. It is anticipated that a number of Arab League countries will quickly give concrete assurances that they will accept small groups of the estimated 6,000 PLO fighters from Beirut.
And that’s a small slice of what happened, this July 22, 1982 as reported on The CBS World News Roundup.
