Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said Tuesday the Defense Department will resist any attempt to divert defense funds to Soviet aid or to make deep cuts in the defense budget before the turmoil in the Soviet Union settles down.
Williams noted that over the next five years the Pentagon budget is due to decline due to the end of the Cold War and a reduced Soviet threat."The news has been even better in the past couple of weeks," Williams said, "but that doesn't change our fundamental assumptions about the nature of the Soviet conventional threat or indeed about the possibility of the Soviet strategic threat.
"This isn't the time to be running around making big changes in the defense budget before we even know the long-term ramifications for the changes in the Soviet Union," Williams added.
He said Pentagon officials will resist any effort within a congressional conference committee to either cut the fiscal 1992 defense budget and divert the savings into Soviet aid or make deeper cuts into the defense package itself. As the situation becomes clearer, he said, the department will examine what further cuts might be made.
"I don't think it's the right way to run the defense budget to sort of read the morning news developments out of the Soviet Union and then make little entries in the defense budget to adjust to the day's news," said Williams.