Russian bear at home in the Arctic

Press, 27 January 1986, Page 20

Russian bear at home in the Arctic

DAVID ADAMSON,

of the “Daily Telegraph,” reviews the

increasing Soviet military activity in the frozen north

In November and December the Russians brought off a re-

markable feat which went far towards confirming what many believed (or feared): that the Arctic is fast becoming a Soviet lake.

They brought grain by ship from Vancouver to Archangel via the Bering Strait and Siberia’s coastal waters, a route previously considered feasible only from late June to early October. At a prodigious cost, much of it disguised military expenditure, the Soviet Union is opening up its Arctic territories and seas and challenging the conventional wisdom that it is strategically hemmed in by hostile neighbours and a paucity of warm water ports. Even by 1975 there were an estimated nine cities of more than 100,000 population in what it defines as the “Soviet north,” and another 39 of between 15,000 and 100,000. The West Siberian oil fields produced 60 per cent of the country’s oil in 1984 and a higher percentage than that today if production plans have been realised. Along the Arctic coast, a fleet of icebreakers, five of them

nuclear powered, struggles to keep open the sea routes, principally that between the Gulf of Ob (where new railways are being driven north to serve the West Siberian oil fields) and Archangel and Murmansk. Apart from oil and gas, the north is a major producer of gold, diamonds, nickel tin, mica and apatite, the chief source of phospherus used by the Soviet fertiliser industry. More important than this enonomic activity is, from the West’s point of view, the Soviet Union’s military power in the Arctic, where it controls about half the littoral. Concentrated in the Kola Peninsula and the Barents Sea next to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s northern flank in Norway is a formidable array of nuclear and conventional strength.

Half the Soviet fleet is based there, including more than half the submarine missile fleet. The latter’s main bastion is the

Barents Sea, a floating missile base.

The latest and largest submarines, such as the 25,000 ton Typhoon, specially designed with their size and reinforcement structures for Arctic conditions,

are capable of heaving their way upwards through the thinner patches of the icecap covering the deep waters close to the Pole to fire their missiles. The depth, the ice cover and the noise made by the constantly moving ice make them virtually impossible to detect. The 8000 km range of the latest submarine-launched missiles means they can hit targets in the United States without leaving the Barents Sea. Only when Soviet submarines were sent to the east coast of the United States as an open riposte to missile deployment in Western Europe have missile submarines ventured south recently through N.A.T.O.’s two lines of seabed sensors, one stretching from northern Norway to the vicinity of Svalbard, the other covering the Denmark Strait (between Greenland and Iceland) and the waters between Iceland and Britain.

It should not be thought, though, that all this activity goes unchallenged or that the West is exactly a military laggard in the Arctic. There may be no American equivalent in Alaska of the great Soviet naval base at Severomorsk in the Kola Peninsula, but American missile and hunter-killer submarines operate increasingly there, as in all probability do British hunter-killer submarines. The missile warning system strung along the North American and Greenland side of the Arctic is being brought up to date, with the new North Warning System due to replace the 30-year-old Distant Early Warning System by 1992 (similar systems are being built by the Soviet Union on its side of the Arctic). Nevertheless, it is surprising

how concentrated Western attention — particularly Western European attention — is on maintaining a military balance in

central Europe and how little thought it gives to what is happening in the north, a much more vulnerable area.

N.A.T.O. refrains from holding exercises east of Tromso, in northern Norway, and generally there are only 1500 Norwegian troops in the border area behind which are 70,000 Soviet troops in the Kola Peninsula. How to reinforce Norway in an emergency against Soviet fleet and air power has always been a nervous preoccupation of the Norwegians.

Apart from their military concerns, the Norwegians would like to see more Western economic and scientific interest in the Svalbard archipelago to balance Soviet activities there.

Svalbard is a Norwegian territory covered by an international treaty that prohibits fortification and entitles signatory States (about 40, including Britain) to exploit mineral resources on land.

The Russians, who have two coal mines there, greatly outnumber the Norwegians, largely because low productivity means that they need about three times as many workers as are required by the Norwegians in their mines. Theories that weapons are stored in the Soviet mines and that many of the workers are troops are generally discounted. Svalbard is often cited as a pioneering example of the sort of international regime which could be introduced in the Arctic, which has no protective treaties like those covering the Antarctic. At the moment, the only things afforded international protection are the polar bears, a singularity which they may retain since there is an imbalance in Arctic affairs which makes wider international agreements unlikely for the time being. In the first place, it is a region of super-Power confrontation, with most of the advantages on the Soviet side. Second, there is no great rush by the United States, Canada and other Western countries to push ahead vigorously with exploitation of its presumed mineral wealth. The North Slope of Alaska accounts for 19 per cent of

American production (and just over 50 per cent of B.P.’s worldwide production from its own reserves), but generally speaking Western excitement over Arctic prospects petered out in the face of exorbitant costs and climatic difficulties at the end of the 19605.

It took the flouting of Canadian territorial claims by the United States Coastguard’s Polar Sea in August, when it barged its way through the North-West Passage, to prod the Canadians into claiming sovereignty over what could conceivably one day become a tanker route between the Alaskan oil fields and the east coast of the United States. There has been a similar lack of urgency over settling the

claims to mineral rights of the Inuit (Eskimo) population in the Canadian Arctic. It will take a very sharp increase in world oil prices to arouse the Klondike spirit in that part of the world, where seabed drilling often requires the creation of a small island as protection against the ice.

The prospects for the Arctic over the next five to 10 years look like being increasing military (and, it is hoped scientific) interest on both sides, and sustained economic development on the Soviet side. In those respects at least the Arctic promises to become a hotter place, followed one day, with luck, by a few cooling agreements preserving its frost-bitten sanctity.