THE NATION: Pacific Challenge

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Cruising routinely through the chill North Pacific last fall, U.S. Navy ships and aircraft reported unusual Russian missile activity. The Navy tracked a couple of Russian intercontinental missile shots into northern waters, considered deploying a U.S. submarine to snag a made-in-Moscow ICBM nose cone before Russian pick-up ships could get to it. During the past fortnight the Navy watched with increasing interest as radar-studded Russian trawlers headed thousands of miles southward into the Central Pacific. Last week the Navy and the U.S. got the news through Moscow's Tass Agency of what the Red fleet was up to.

The Soviet Union, said Tass, was about to test a series of "more powerful rockets," the first tests to take place between Jan.15 and Feb. 15 in an area of the Pacific 280 miles long by 160 miles wide (see map), 500 miles south of the U.S.'s Johnston Island, 1,300 miles east of the U.S. trust-territory Marshall Islands, 1,000 miles southwest of the new 50th state of Hawaii. Radio Moscow warned the world's shipping to keep out of that part of the Pacific or risk getting hit by the Red rockets' "penultimate stage."

Strategic Reach. The Soviet announcement left unsaid what kind of rockets the Kremlin intended to test. Said Tass: "Soviet scientists and engineers are now working to develop a more powerful rocket to launch heavy satellites and undertake space nights to planets." U.S.S.R. space scientist. Professor V. Dobronravov, said on Radio Moscow that the Pacific shots were preparatory to "man's flight into interplanetary space."

Although every Communist propagandist from Stettin to Pyongyang stressed the peaceful purposes of the Pacific tests, the shots would have obvious military value. If the Russians fired into the Central Pacific from their bases near the Caspian and Aral seas, they would be testing at 7,700-mile range plus as compared with the best 6,300-mile range of the U.S.'s Atlas, hence nailing down a longer strategic reach. If the Russians fired into the Central Pacific from Kamchatka at 3,800-mile range, they would at least be testing out their capabilities in a range bordered by such major U.S. naval bases as Pearl Harbor, Guam and Midway.

Missile Invasion. U.S. spacemen gritted their teeth and braced for anything up to and including the warm-water landing of a man-in-space shot. The Pentagon was concerned over the blunt intrusion of Russian missile power of whatever kind into the Central Pacific. But in the strict sense, the U.S. could do nothing to stall off the Soviet rockets into the Pacific without abridging its traditional support for freedom of the seas and bringing into question the U.S.'s own missile shots into international waters.