National Affairs: RUSSIA’S MILITARY: ON THE DEFENSIVE

A Fine Army Is Its Core; the Missile Is Its Hope

After a 26-month tour of duty in the Pentagon and with the far-ranging U.S. armed forces, TIME’S Military Correspondent Edwin Rees flew into Moscow to glean what he could about the armed forces matched against the U.S.—the army, navy, air and missile forces of the U.S.S.R. His report:

VIRTUALLY everything that is known of the Soviet military is, to a large extent, what the Soviets want the world to know. But better intelligence and modern science are helping to make the West less dependent on the Soviet’s handout information and on the gleanings of detail-dogging Western military attaches in Moscow. Examples:

¶ U.S. radar stations in Turkey have counted hundreds of firings of 800-mile Russian intermediate-range ballistic missiles (v. 30-40 U.S. IRBM firings).

¶ In the fission process, nuclear reactors produce a gas—Krypton 85—which hangs in the atmosphere. The U.S. can take careful readings of Krypton 85 in the air, subtract what it knows it has put there, subtract what the British have put there, and assign the balance to Russian origin. Making an even less exact calculation, U.S. experts guesstimate that the Russians must have something like 3,000 nuclear weapons. The U.S. may have at least three times that, but it does not make much difference: nuclear parity is achieved when each has enough to destroy the other.

¶ Soviet refugees say that high-altitude U.S. photo-reconnaissance planes flying in from the West made a nighttime penetration of Russian airspace in late 1956 or early 1957. MIG-17s from the Moscow air defense district scrambled to meet them, could not get up to their altitude (above 50,000 ft.). The commander of the Moscow air defense zone is reported to have been fired after this episode.

TWELVE MINUTES TO TWELVE HOURS

How does the U.S.S.R. measure up as a military threat? The best-informed opinion, based on scientific detection, intelligence and other estimates: despite advances in missilery, the Reds are considerably less powerful than many U.S. commentators have claimed. To assault the U.S., the Russians would have to coordinate a surprise attack against the West’s military complex on three continents, would simultaneously have to hit targets twelve minutes away in Europe, 120 minutes away in North Africa, twelve hours and more away in the U.S. Until the day when intercontinental missiles are much closer to perfection, the Russians cannot surprise all these, plus bases in Greenland and Canada, and the floating airfields of the Sixth and Seventh Fleets. The first bases to be hit would signal the alarm. The U.S. would certainly be able to devastate the vitals of the Soviet Union with no more than 50 bombers. “Wars,” as the U.S. Sixth Fleet’s Vice Admiral Charles Randall (“Cat”) Brown has said, “are won by remnant forces.”

There are many isolated exceptions that demand careful attention by the West, but the overwhelming fact about Russia’s military machine is not its offensive capability but the fact that it is geared to defense. Here is how it sizes up:

NAVY

After a brief, costly investment in cruisers, the Russians have decided on essentially a submarine force (500 boats) as the heart of their navy. The sub is basically a defense weapon, designed to deny the seas to an enemy. As any tourist can see, there is no military shipbuilding at the massive Kronstadt yards near Leningrad. The ways are jammed instead with commercial shipping; four cruisers of the Sverdlov class lie there still uncompleted. In tune with the defensive concept is the fact that the Russians have devised the most deadly mines yet known in warfare. One navy officer told me that “we couldn’t get through their heavily mined waters if we wanted to without great—too great—loss.” There is still no evidence that the Reds have built a nuclear sub; it may be that they have not yet reached the state of the art required to build one.

AIRPOWER

The Russians have a military air fleet of between 18,000 and 20,000 planes, mostly jets. Their bombing force—about equal in number to that of the U.S. Strategic Air Command—consists of about 1,500 jets and turboprops. Most of this force is shortrange, but the U.S.S.R. has developed inflight refueling techniques that provide enough range to make round-trip missions to the U.S. And though their Bison and Badger bombers are inferior to the U.S.’s B-47s and B-52s (and Russian airplane maintenance and crew-training are low grade), the criterion of a good bomber is not how well it stacks up against the other fellow’s in design or in direct combat, but whether or not it can perform its mission. The Russian bomber can.

Defensive fighter planes—perhaps 90% of the U.S.S.R.’s air force—are another matter. Obsolescent U.S. F-86s armed with Sidewinders so far have been far superior to the MIG-17s, as Free China’s pilots have proved (TIME, Oct. 6). Nobody yet knows how well the U.S.’s F-100 series might do against the newest Russian fighter, the MIG-21. Nor is there much fresh information about the new Soviet all-weather, delta-winged interceptor. The big Russian interceptor force is helped in its job by what may be the world’s best air-detection network. Soviet planes have not yet been able to gun down U.S. planes at high altitudes, but they have seen them on their radar—proof that they are not asleep at the oscilloscope.

ARMY

Strongest force in the traditionally land-warfare-oriented U.S.S.R. is an army of 160 divisions. It is the only major army in the world that has been completely re-equipped since World War II. Troop transport, at the moment, is not an urgent problem; Russia’s army is already well deployed along the Soviet-satellite borders in the west (for potential use against the West or the satellites) and beyond the virgin lands in the east (for potential use against the West or the Chinese Communists). Even so, she is building a big modern fleet of jet and turboprop transport planes—potential troop carriers.

MISSILES

The Russians have kept leak-tight security on the missile program. Western travelers in the Soviet have spotted no missiles save for Nike-type anti-aircraft birds around Moscow and a few others on flat-bed trucks in Moscow parades. This gives rise to a Western suspicion that the Russians are not so advanced in missilery as the Sputniks would indicate. Nevertheless, the U.S. radar posts have “watched” 800-mile flights from the Krasny Yar missile range and from the island of Novaya Zemlya off the northern coast in the Arctic Sea; and the Russians have shot an ICBM thousands of miles. It may be that they have not yet developed a dependable nose cone or solved the re-entry problem (the U.S. Army’s Jupiter nose cone was recovered intact, earlier this year, after a 1,600-mile shoot). Still, the U.S. has yet to go the full distance with the Atlas 5,500-mile ICBM. In missiles, more than in any other field, the Russians may have the edge on the U.S., principally because of their head start. U.S. missile production should be able to catch up. If it does not, missiles could become the weapon that can give the Soviets promise of becoming a more even match for the West.