Scandinavia Wayward Missile

“I heard a loud bang, then a deafening roar, and for a few seconds I could see a reddish-yellow flame streaking across the sky,” recalled Bear Hunter Herman Sotkajarvi, a resident of the northernmost reaches of Norway, well above the Arctic Circle. “The house quivered, windows rattled, and my three dogs started barking.” What Sotkajarvi apparently saw in the early afternoon of Dec. 28 was a runaway cruise missile fired from either a submarine or a ship during Soviet naval maneuvers in the Barents Sea, northeast of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Norwegian radar tracked the supersonic object as it crossed the Pasvik River on the Soviet-Norwegian border; it headed southwest toward Lake Inari in Finland, where it disappeared.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the errant missile’s flight was the degree to which, on the eve of U.S.-Soviet disarmament talks in Geneva, governments played down the incident. At first the Soviet Union made no comment. In neutral Finland, where soldiers scoured the border area by helicopter and snowmobile in the bitter cold, officials quietly checked with Moscow to see what had happened. President Mauno Koivisto declared in a New Year’s message that cruise missiles were causing “insecurity” in Scandinavia and called on both NATO and the Warsaw Pact to accept a ban on such weapons in northern Europe. But his remarks had been recorded a week earlier and were not precipitated by the wayward missile. In Norway, the government decided to send a note of protest to the Soviet Union, but the Norwegian defense chief, General Frederik Bull-Hansen, urged the press not to “dramatize” the story. Said he: “There is no reason to believe that the missile came over Norwegian territory to test our preparedness.”

The British government also went to some effort to down-play the affair, if only to avoid giving aid and comfort to the anti-cruise movement in Britain, where 32 U.S. cruise missiles are currently based. By contrast, the opposition Labor Party quickly seized on the report as an argument against further deployment of U.S. cruises in Western Europe. Charging that the flight over Scandinavia showed how “unreliable and extremely dangerous” the missiles are, Labor’s defense spokesman, Denzil Davies, contended that “it is time for the superpowers to negotiate these weapons out of existence.” A senior British official suggested wryly that the whole affair had been arranged by the Kremlin in order to give the anti-cruise forces in Britain a boost. But in Paris, French President Francois Mitterrand expressed concern over the incident. Said he: “It is frightening that such things can go astray, because this sort of (nuclear) war is one of split-second reactions.”

The U.S. position was a study in calm. A year or two ago, the Reagan Administration might have registered outrage at a violation of NATO airspace by a Soviet missile. But with the Geneva talks about to get under way, the Administration did not wish to make the negotiations any more difficult than they already would be. Pentagon Spokesman Michael Burch emphasized that the matter was an “isolated” event. Said he: “Let’s not make more of this than it’s worth.”

U.S. experts believe that the Soviet cruise was on a training mission and was probably not armed with either a nuclear or a conventional warhead. They also concluded that the missile was most likely an old model that Moscow had had in its naval arsenal for more than 20 years, rather than a test version of the SS-NX-21, a long-range (2,000-mile) weapon that the Soviets are developing to compete with the American Tomahawk, a missile that has had several errant flights of its own. Nonetheless, the mishap pointed up the dangers of such weapons, whether nuclear or conventional, which cannot be controlled with absolute precision.

At week’s end the Soviet Union shed light on the incident. The Soviet ) Ambassador in Helsinki paid a call on the Finnish Foreign Minister to acknowledge that, “in connection with target shooting in the Barents Sea,” a target drone “could have strayed off course and violated Finnish airspace.” Almost simultaneously, the Soviet Ambassador in Oslo delivered a similar message to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.

In a rare confession of a Soviet mistake, the Soviet news agency TASS said the missile went off course after it was launched during an exercise in the Barents Sea, “and disappeared in a westerly direction.” The apologetic tone contrasted sharply with the Soviet reaction following similar events. When, for example, a Soviet submarine was detected in shallow waters near a Swedish naval base in 1981, Moscow denied that Swedish waters had been violated, and it accused the Swedes of trying to create an anti-Soviet atmosphere. As for the misguided missile, as this week began it was still missing in the wintry gloom of northern Finland.