With every new hole knocked in the Berlin Wall and the East German border with the Federal Republic, hopes rise higher that the dream of a fibre optic telecommunications trunk circling the globe will become reality. The big gap is the one between Western Europe and the Far East, and US West Inc and British Telecommunications Plc hope to bridge it with the proposed Trans-Siberian Lightline (CI No 1,190). According to the Washington Post, the Denver phone company plans to apply for formal permission from the international regulatory bodies to proceed with the project, in which the Soviet partner is Ministry of Posts & Telecommunications in Moscow. West Germany’s posts and telecommunications minister Christian Schwarz-Schilling has been arguing in favour of the project in Washington, and the telephone trunk would be a big step forward in furthering the new US and European Community policy objective of fostering economic development in the Comecon countries – the German Democratic Republic has an antiquated telephone system and telephone density is a mere 16 per 100 homes. The fact that high penetration of telecommunications – particularly facsimile machines – make repressive state propaganda less effective is another argument put forward for building the link, and the only real difficulty will be getting the proposal through CoCom, the Western nations’ watchdog on high technology exports to the Comecon countries – digital switching and fibre optic equipment are still on the banned list of exports on the grounds that it is of potential military value. The other partners in the consortium proposing the 12,000-mile cable are Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co of Japan; the Overseas Telecommunications Commission Ltd, Australia; Great Northern Telegraph Co, Copenhagen and Telecom Denmark; and Societa Finanziaria Telefonica pA, Italy.
