A Game of Chicken

HIGH SEAS

Snooping on each other is standard operating procedure for both the Russian and U.S. navies. The Russians scoop up garbage dumped from U.S. warships in search of intelligence clues, use trawlers loaded with electronic equipment off Guam and in the Tonkin Gulf to monitor movements of U.S. warplanes and warn their friends in Viet Nam of their approach. The U.S., on the other hand, routinely buzzes Russian cargo ships on the way to Viet Nam for a customs inspection of sorts, tracks Russian submarines in the Mediterranean and elsewhere until they pop to the surface. Last week, however, this sort of jockeying on the high seas reached the scraping point.

When the U.S. aircraft carrier Hor net, accompanied by two submarines and some eleven U.S. and Japanese destroyers, steamed into the Sea of Japan on maneuvers (Operation Crossed T), they knew that they would find the Russians waiting. Moscow likes to consider the Sea of Japan just a large bay of its naval base at Vladivostok. This time the Russians did not just look on. The Russian destroyer Besslednyi began cutting in between the maneuvering vessels, ignoring urgent warning signals to stay clear. In a game of "chicken" on the sea, it twice came to within 50 ft. of two U.S. destroyers dispatched to drive it away.

On the third pass, the Besslednyi scraped sides with the U.S. destroyer Walker, losing a motor launch and tearing a whip antenna off the Walker. Then it withdrew. Next day DD025, a Russian destroyer of the heavy Krupny class, armed with two missile launchers, continued the contest of nerves. Again, Walker was one of two ships ordered to force it away. This time the Russian ship swerved directly across the Walker's bow. The two ships brushed momentarily together, and the Walker disengaged with a six-inch hole in its hull above the waterline.

No one knew just what the Russians were up to; they may just have been harassing the American ships to challenge the U.S. Navy's domination of the Sea of Japan, or they may have feared that U.S. warships would sight a new class of Russian submarine that has begun operating out of Vladivostok. Washington issued tough-worded public protests but tried hard to play the incident down. The Soviet destroyers withdrew, at least for the present, to the respectable distance from which they usually view U.S. naval maneuvers.