Asia: The Soviets Stir Up the Pacific

ASIA Flexing their new muscles provokes alarm and resolve

The relentless Soviet military buildup of the past two decades has been a worldwide phenomenon. But in the past year or so, in addition to digging in deeper in Afghanistan, the U.S.S.R. seems to have been concentrating on its eastern flank: it has steadily reinforced what were already formidable land, air and sea forces along the rim of the Pacific. A shift in the area's balance of power would be bad news for the West. The U.S. has some important old friends in East Asia, notably Japan, as well as a big if problematic new one, the People's Republic of China. East Asia also contains two perennial trouble spots that could be flash points of superpower confrontation—the Korean peninsula and Indochina. TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, who has returned from an extensive East Asian tour, reports:

For more than 30 years, U.S. diplomats, generals and admirals have often been frustrated in their attempts to get America's friends and allies in East Asia to overcome their many differences and join forces in resisting Soviet advancements in the region. The prospects for such cooperation have recently improved, not necessarily because the U.S. is suddenly more persuasive, but because the Soviet Union has been building up its military forces so vigorously and, in the view of many East Asians, provocatively.

Japan is feeling particularly exposed to Soviet military power. In the past two years, the Soviet Union has garrisoned about 10,000 ground troops on four islands north of Japan. The Soviet Union seized the islands at the close of World War II, but Japan still claims them. This newly strengthened Soviet outpost includes Mi-24 assault helicopters, among the most sophisticated antitank gunships in the world and therefore an obvious threat to the Japanese armored units stationed just across the Nemuro Strait on the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido.

In the past six months, the U.S.S.R. has also significantly beefed up the firepower it has aimed at Japan from the Soviet mainland. The Kremlin has replaced its MiG-21s with the more advanced MiG-23 combat fighters and has moved a battery of SS-20 mobile missiles with multiple warheads, plus at least ten supersonic Backfire bombers armed with antiship missiles, from Europe to bases near Vladivostok, directly across the Sea of Japan from Hokkaido.

One Soviet motive for these threatening deployments is to give military weight to Moscow's territorial claim over the disputed islands. The Kremlin may have made its point, but it has also aroused Japanese ire and permitted Japanese generals and hawkish politicians to talk more openly about increased defense spending. Japanese public opinion still fears the shadow of the country's militaristic past, and the government is quite sensitive to the lingering resentment among East Asian countries that were occupied by Japan in World War II. But, as one Japanese official puts it, "advocacy of a more active defense policy was virtually taboo a year or two ago. Now it is merely controversial. We have the Russians to thank for the change."