The Region - News from March 24, 1986

The Soviet Union’s ranking West Coast representative, who called President Reagan’s strategic defense initiative a “sheer fantasy,” told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council that the United States and the U.S.S.R. must end their “tense, complicated and unstable” relations, in order to stop the “mad and irrational arms race.” Consul General Valentin M. Kamenev’s speech was applauded, but his answers about Afghanistan and Soviet anti-Semitism brought skeptical murmurs and even jeers of disbelief from the luncheon crowd.