to a few
projects. Among these are a COMECON electric power grid, which serves
the western Ukraine, especially the city of Kiev; a Romanian-Bulgarian
project to construct a power dam and navigation system for sixty miles
along the Danube River; a system of high-speed expressways to connect
the capital cities of member countries; a project to modernize steel
industries and to reduce production and delivery time; and membership in
the International Bank for Economic Cooperation, headed by a former
deputy chairman of the Soviet State Bank.

United Nations Membership and Participation

Bulgaria became a member of the UN on December 14, 1955. Its delegates
are active in committee work of the UN organs and subsidiary bodies as
well as in deliberations on the floor of the General Assembly. One of
its most important committee assignments is to the so-called First
Committee, which was established as one of the original six committees
under the General Assembly's rules of procedure in 1946. It deals with
political and security matters and was headed by Milko Tarabanov, one of
five Bulgarian delegates to the UN in the session held from September
through December 1972.

Available records of General Assembly activities in 1970 showed active
participation of Bulgaria's delegates in committee work touching on such
matters as the review of administrative tribunal judgments; the question
of defining aggression; the peaceful uses of outer space; the peaceful
uses of the seabed under international waters; and the implementation of
the declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries
and peoples. Bulgaria was particularly interested in the Caribbean
territories.

As a member of the Committee on Disarmament, Bulgaria, along with
twenty-four other participating states, met in Geneva in 1970. The
committee met to consider the question of cessation of the nuclear arms
race and associated matters, such as the prohibition of emplacing
nuclear arms or other destructive weapons on the seabed. A refinement of
the comprehensive test ban treaty of 1963 extended the prohibition on
arms control to underground testing. Bulgaria, along with other Eastern
European countries, also supported draft proposals of the committee not
to undertake the "development, production, and stockpiling of chemical
and bacteriological weapons" and the consequent "destruction of such
weapons" as well as the prohibition of "biological methods of warfare.