Files are held back by the Government

Development, Jacques Attali, privately set out plans for a “debtnuclear swap” in a bid to stop the weapons falling into the wrong hands.

Files released show that on December 11, he wrote to Prime Minister John Major informing him that he had asked one of the bank’s top experts to begin working up a scheme.

Under the proposal, an international fund would be established to purchase the bulk of the Soviet Union’s 60 billion dollars in foreign debt in return for the “rights” to Soviet nuclear technology and the dismantling of its estimated 25,000 nuclear arms.

Despite the costs, Mr Attali said it still represented only a fraction of the sums Western powers were spending every year on defence.

“The price of world peace might only amount to some one per cent of the combined defence budgets of the G7,” he wrote. “In the present situation it seems to me that no idea should be discounted in the effort to overcome the difficulties.”

However, with events moving rapidly in Moscow, the plan seems to have generated little interest in Downing Street.

On December 23, Mr Major spoke by telephone with an emotional president Mikhail Gorbachev who admitted the Soviet Union was on the point of collapse and may soon no longer exist. Mr Gorbachev sought to reassure the Prime Minister that the nuclear arsenal remained under “strict control”. Two days later Mr Gorbachev announced his resignation, to be followed by a declaration that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. DOZENS OF confidential government files covering Britain’s European policy in the early 1990s have been held back from public release.

Of the 45 European files due to be released to the National Archives at Kew, west London, 38 have been retained by the Cabinet Office.

Among those held back are files covering the creation of the euro and the 1991 Maastricht Treaty negotiations. Other withheld files include dossiers on the marriages of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, the Lockerbie bombing, the Scott arms-toIraq inquiry, and the basing of US cruise missiles in the UK. A Cabinet Office spokesman denied files were being deliberately withheld to prevent media scrutiny.