Soviet submarines

Press, 6 July 1983, Page 12

Soviet submarines

Sir, — In his reply to my letter (June 28), Stuart McMillan fails to produce the hard evidence to support his assertion that, “Norway and Sweden recently have both had to deal with Soviet submarines in places where they ought not to be.” The Soviet submarine which surfaced in Karlskrona in October, 1981, was an indisputable fact. No submarines of comparable substance materialised in October 1982, nor in. May, 1983. Mr McMillan admits that “evidence that other submarines have been Soviet is circumstanial,” and what does the “circumstantial evidence” amount to? “Twin propeller noise and bot-tom-crawling capacity” not characteristic of N.A.T.O. submarines. Can Mr McMillan state with certainty that Soviet submarines have “bottom-crawling capacity”? Or that any submarines were there at all? In the interests of journalistic factual accuracy, Mr McMillan should frankly acknowledge that there is no evidence that Soviet submarines were involved in October, 1982 and May 1983. — Yours, etc., M. CREEL. June 29, 1983. [Stuart McMillan replies: “The following quotation, which comes

from a summary of the Swedish Submarine Defence Commission report, addresses some of the questions raised by Mr Creel. “The commission points out that the question of the national identity of the foreign submarines violating Swedish territory cannot avoid being put. The report confirms that neither sea floor nor any other investigation has yielded proof in the form of identifiable objects which could bind a specific nation to the submarine violations. However, evidence in abundance —

technical and circumstantial — has been secured, analysed and reported to the commission. The total amount of evidence is sufficient to form the basis of a judgment by experts that the submarine intrusion into the Harsfjarden area in October 1982 and — at at least to an overwhelming degree — the 1980 s as a whole, were undertaken by Warsaw Pact submarines. The fact that the Soviet Union has some 45 submarines of conventional size in operation in the Baltic, whereas Poland has only four older submarines and the German Democratic Republic as far as is known has none, is part of the evidence that in this respect the Warsaw Pact is tantamount to the Soviet Union. No observation has been obtained indicating intrusions in Swedish waters of N.A.T.O. submarines. The committee, after a careful scrutiny of this issue, associates itself with this judgment.’ The report also gives details of the other evidence. I find the reasoning persuasive enough to support the assertions I made in the article to which Mr Creel referred.”]