Temptation of Trade

Pipe--the big kind that Russia desperately needs to complete its vast gas and oil network stretching from the Pacific to the Elbe--was the second biggest topic in European capitals last week. For months, NATO has been urging a total embargo on large-diameter pipe. Sputtered a NATO official in Paris: "Sell them rifles. Even sell them atomic bombs.

But don't sell them pipe."

Provoking the outcry was a rumble that started in Bonn fortnight ago when rebellious members of the Bundestag rounded up enough votes to reverse the government's cancellation of a juicy $20 million Soviet pipe order. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer rushed back home from a Lake Como vacation on the eve of the balloting, managed to avoid humiliating defeat only by ordering his Christian Democrats to stay off the floor, thus causing the lack of a quorum. Der Alte's last-ditch maneuver proved his solid support of the U.S., which, unlike most of its allies, attaches great strategic significance to Moscow's pipeline network. But it got Adenauer into trouble at home. The pro-NATO Socialists called the Bundestag boycott dirty pool; the industrialists complained more bitterly than ever.

There the issue could have simmered indefinitely; but last week the British calmly announced that, since they had never supported NATO's pipe embargo in the first place, the government had no objection if a British firm accepted a Soviet deal for pipe that Bonn had just canceled. That only one British company was technically equipped to turn out small amounts of large-diameter pipe--and had not even received a bid from Moscow--was of small comfort to U.S. and West German officials. Nor were they reassured by the fact that Italy, a major supplier of Soviet pipe before the NATO ban, did not immediately grab off part of the lucrative trade; Italian manufacturers simply were backed up at the moment with their own domestic orders.

What really had Washington and Bonn concerned was London's next move. Brit ain, excluded for now from the Common Market and plagued by serious unemployment, was eager for export markets anywhere; if one inch of large-diameter oil pipe was delivered to Russia, the NATO boycott would be broken. West Germany and Italy could no longer be restrained. Neither could France, which has a massive (500,000 tons), and mostly unused, annual capacity for pipe production, but which supports the U.S. completely on the allies' debate over the strategic value of Moscow's Big Inch.

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