East-West: Moscow's Muscle Flexing

Soviet ships prowl the North Atlantic in the biggest maneuvers ever

Day after day, the warships streamed out of Soviet naval bases on the Baltic and Arctic coasts. Among them were brand-new guided-missile destroyers, missile submarines and, most impressive of all, the 28,000-ton nuclear-powered battle cruiser Kirov. By midweek the hastily assembled battle fleet spanned a vast expanse of ocean, from the waters off Greenland, across to the Shetland Islands, northeast to the fringes of Scandinavia and as far as the glacial Barents Sea. In the air, Soviet antisubmarine and strike aircraft flew almost continuous missions over,the Norwegian Sea. Backfire bombers, reputed to be the Soviets' most capable air-to-surface missile carriers, were detected in larger numbers, and farther from their land bases, than ever before.

The size and significance of the latest Soviet maneuvers were at first widely disputed, even within the Reagan Administration. Early in the week, some Pentagon sources were saying that only about 20 Soviet warships were involved in the North Atlantic. At his news conference Wednesday night, the President put the figure at 40. But in a subsequent interview with TIME, Navy Secretary John Lehman Jr. said that "the fleet exercise topped off at over 140 ships." Subtracting trawlers and landing craft, the

Navy later maintained, there were at least 140 surface ships and 70 submarines involved in the exercises. Although Lehman could have been exaggerating the numbers to buttress his often stated case for expansion of the Navy, he left no doubt that the latest maneuvers were the largest the Soviets have ever conducted.

At the same time, Soviet ships seemed to be more visible in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and even the Caribbean (see map). The cruiser Leningrad was reported to have left Cuba in company with other Soviet vessels, their destination unknown. Although early reports that Soviet ships were conducting auxiliary exercises in oceans other than the North Atlantic seemed to be incorrect, just tracking the global movements of Moscow's fleet created headaches for the U.S. Navy. For the second time in twelve days, the game of "chicken at sea" that skippers from both superpowers frequently play led to a potentially serious incident.

In the meantime, the Western powers expressed their concern about an> other recurring problem, the inconvenience and occasional danger to (TM) Western aircraft as a result of Soviet air activity in the three 20-miles wide air corridors that link West "Berlin to West Germany. As a result of recent Soviet military activity over East Germany, Western civilian airliners have had to make frequent changes in altitude on flights to and from West Berlin.