The Soviet Threat to NATO's Northern Flank

ON the bleak coast of the Barents Sea, where the Soviet Union shares a common border with Norway near the roof of the world, the Norwegian defense force of 400 men is frequently witness to a disturbing scene. They watch on radar as the Soviets practice assaults on the coast of their Kola Peninsula, some 300 miles away. In the Soviet war games, the attacking force is always victorious and the defenders are always defeated.

That spectacle points up a growing Soviet threat to the northern flank of NATO, which extends from Norway's North Cape to West Germany's Baltic coast (see map). NATO's northern command is outnumbered by the Soviets four-to-one on the ground, seven-to-one in aircraft and six-to-one in ships in the north. "The Russians are very busy displaying raw military power on the northern flank," reports TIME Correspondent John Mulliken, who recently toured the region. "It is a significant example of how the Soviets intend to use the pressure of their operational armed forces to achieve their political policies in the 1970s and 1980s."

The Russians' overwhelming military predominance in the northern flank is most evident in the icy waters of the area. Since the Soviet navy launched a massive buildup after the 1962 Cuban crisis, it has become, as Jane's Fighting Ships notes, "the supernavy of a superpower." Moscow's growing strength at sea has long since been noted in the Mediterranean and in the Indian Ocean. But the fact is that the northern fleet, the smallest in the Soviet navy at the end of World War II, is now the biggest--the superfleet of a supernavy.

Operating out of ice-free Murmansk, the northern fleet has an estimated 560 ships, including 160 submarines, more than 65 of them nuclear-powered (but not counting sizable forces in the Baltic, plus the East German and Polish navies). By contrast, the entire U.S. Atlantic Fleet has 358 ships, of which 40 to 50 are assigned to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Since 1968, the U.S. command has been cut back 25% in ships and 19% in men, and it is scheduled to lose another ten ships by next summer. Says Norway's Rear Admiral Magne Braadland: "The threat to the U.S. is not coming from Viet Nam and not from Central Europe either. It is sailing from Murmansk."

At a time of tentative detente in Europe, the Soviet threat is posed not in the stark terms of war but in the gray area of geopolitics. As Defense Secretary Melvin Laird put it: "If the Russians have a superior military force, they can gain their political objectives throughout the world without the use of weapons. There is no military ad vantage to overkill, but the political gains are tremendous." British Prime Minister Edward Heath outlined this gloomy scenario in a recent speech to the House of Commons: "The Soviets may calculate that eventually the sheer disparity of military strength would leave Western Europe with no convincing strategy. Political pressure, shrewdly applied and backed by the threat of greatly superior military force, could compel one of the more exposed members of the alliance to lapse into neutrality. Then a process of disintegration could begin which would lead to the ultimate price, an extension of the Soviet sphere of influence gradually into countries at present members of [NATO], and if possible, to the Atlantic."

That pressure is already being applied to Norway, the most exposed country on NATO's northern flank. For the past decade, the Soviet navy has staged big exercises in the Norwegian Sea, making the point that Norway, with no land connection to the rest of NATO, is at the mercy of whichever country rules the waves. Johan Jorgen Hoist, research director of the Norwegian Foreign Policy Institute, warns that the Soviets intend "to push their naval defense line outwards to Iceland and the Faeroes," which could turn the Norwegian Sea into what he calls "a Soviet lake."

To a lesser degree, the Soviets have made a similar point with Denmark, whose NATO task in any conflict would be to mine the exit from the Baltic--a move that would require approval from the Danish Parliament. The Soviets now regard the Baltic as virtually a Cornmunist sea. On a "goodwill" call in Copenhagen last August, Soviet Vice Admiral L.V. Mizhin, deputy commander of the Soviet Baltic fleet, pointedly complained that an American cruiser had shown up in the Baltic Sea, and that West Germany had intensified its naval exercises there. The Soviets are on the verge of achieving their most concrete gain to date in Iceland, which is known as "the cork in the bottle" for the entire northern tier of NATO's defenses. From Iceland, U.S. Navy aircraft keep track of Russian craft moving through the Faeroe Channel and the Denmark Strait--including subs carrying Polaristype missiles targeted on U.S. cities. Last July the new coalition government of Iceland, which includes two Communist Ministers, asked the Americans to depart from their strategically important Keflavik base. Negotiations on the request have yet to begin, however, and they could take up to four years before resulting in any move.

To remain a plausible deterrent, NATO depends un a strategy of rapid reinforcement in time of crisis. Yet if Norway or Iceland were threatened, it would take an estimated ten days to two weeks for U.S. reinforcements to reach the northern flank, ten to 20 days for Britain's troops, and 30 days for Canada's. That assumes, of course, that they could even reach their destination through waters controlled by the Soviet northern fleet. Thus the real threat posed by Russia's dominance in the northern seas is to NATO's credibility and perhaps, in the end, to the alliance's unity.

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