Soviets to Move Nuclear Subs Out of Baltic

MOSCOW — President Mikhail S. Gorbachev announced Thursday that the Soviet Union will withdraw all its nuclear-armed submarines from the Baltic Sea in a step toward making Northern Europe a nuclear-free zone.

Gorbachev, pressing the Kremlin’s overall disarmament drive and its goal of a world eventually free of nuclear weapons, said the Soviet Union has already removed or repositioned all its tactical nuclear missiles capable of striking Northern Europe.

He said the Soviet Union is also preparing to “eliminate certain classes of sea-launched nuclear weapons,” presumably cruise missiles, from the Baltic Sea region.

The Soviet leader, who is visiting Finland, said the Soviet initiatives are intended to give momentum to the movement to rid the Baltic and, if possible, all Northern Europe of nuclear arms.

“We are prepared to come to an agreement with all the nuclear powers and the Baltic states on effective guarantees for the nuclear-free status of the Baltic Sea,” Gorbachev said, addressing 1,500 Finnish politicians, businessmen and community leaders in Helsinki, the Finnish capital.

He said the Soviet Union is taking these steps to follow up a speech he made two years ago in the Soviet port of Murmansk proposing a nuclear-free zone in Northern Europe as well as other measures to reduce East-West tensions in Europe.

The measures were unilateral, he said, and no longer conditioned on Western agreement on a nuclear-free zone in the region.

The moves, although welcomed in Helsinki and most other Scandinavian capitals, were met with skepticism in Washington.

“We do not believe that nuclear-free zones contribute to security in Europe,” Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary, said. “Most of these proposals have been designed to affect (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s) deterrence capability while leaving Soviet nuclear weapons intact.”

Anticipating a negative U.S. reaction, Gorbachev addressed Washington directly and said, “Let us meet halfway on the wish of the peoples in Northern Europe to turn their countries into a reliable flank of a European and worldwide system of security.”

In his 1987 Murmansk speech, Gorbachev endorsed a Finnish proposal for a nuclear-free zone in Northern Europe, centering on the 148,600-square-mile Baltic Sea. The two NATO countries in the region, Norway and Denmark, do not permit nuclear weapons in their territory in peacetime, and the other two countries, Finland and Sweden, are neutral.

“The Soviet Union started by removing from operational status two Golf-class submarines, and before the end of 1990 it will destroy the four remaining submarines of the same class,” Gorbachev said Thursday. “We will also destroy their standard nuclear missile payloads, and we have no plans for their replacement.”

Six Golf II subs, 321 feet long with a displacement of 2,950 tons, have been deployed in the Baltic Sea since 1976, according to Jane’s Fighting Ships, the authoritative British naval reference. Soviet commentators have said the submarines each carried 18 ballistic missiles.

The Golf II, increasingly obsolete, has slowly been withdrawn from service, and Western naval attaches here contend that those still in use are largely bargaining chips in arms-reduction negotiations.

“They are not only old and inefficient but they are becoming more and more dangerous as their operating systems deteriorate,” a NATO submariner here said. “Every one still in service could be withdrawn without any diminution of Soviet naval strength or strategic capability.”

Gorbachev noted the sharp, unilateral reductions in Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces over the last year and the shift of the remaining units into a defensive posture.

“In the northern region, their transformation in this direction will be completed next year,” he said. “The numerical strength of Soviet land forces on the Soviet-Finnish border is now less than the total numerical strength of land forces in Finland.

“It can be said with certainty that the military-political situation in the north has greatly improved. An attack or an outbreak of armed conflict in the area is out of the question.”

Acknowledging the strong Scandinavian concern about Soviet naval and air units based on and around the Kola Peninsula, the headquarters of the Soviet Union’s powerful Northern Fleet, Gorbachev said these are strategic forces whose fate depends on negotiations with the United States on a 50% reduction in strategic arms.

But he suggested that countries of the region pursue their own negotiations on various confidence-building measures and other agreements on naval activities in the seas of Northern Europe.

Gorbachev said the Soviet Union will accept, for example, Norway’s proposal for negotiations to establish procedures for the mutual notification of accidents involving ships, including nuclear-powered submarines. Three Soviet nuclear-powered submarines have been involved in accidents since April in the Barents and Norwegian seas.

Finnish officials welcomed Gorbachev’s announcements, and they are assured of a warm reception even in Norway and Denmark, the region’s NATO members. They are also likely to win support among political groups in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where pressure has been building for the removal of nuclear weapons from the region.

In his speech Thursday, Gorbachev effectively ended four decades of relentless Soviet pressure on Finland to avoid offending Moscow in any way through a policy known as “Finlandization.”

Finland’s neutrality, established in a 1948 treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union, had caused “ripples in the past,” Gorbachev said, and retains “distinct features.”

“But what I wish to stress most firmly is that the Soviet Union unconditionally recognizes Finland’s neutral status,” he declared, “and it will continue to observe it in the future in full measure.”

Discussing the next meeting on the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which formulated a new relationship between East and West based on expanding contacts, increasing trade and reducing tension, he suggested that a summit conference be held in 1992 in Helsinki.

Gorbachev also opened the possibility for direct contacts between legislators in the Soviet Union’s Baltic republics and the Scandinavian countries grouped in the Nordic Council.

COUNTERPOINT

The Soviet proposal for a “nuclear-free” northern Europe is less than meets the eye, critics say. The four nuclear submarines that Moscow plans to withdraw from the Baltic Sea were headed for the scrap heap anyway. In July, the Kremlin indicated it will eliminate all its Golf-class submarines because they are outdated, said Richard Sharpe, editor of the authoritative Jane’s Fighting Ships. Losing the whole Golf fleet would not significantly hurt Soviet military capability, other experts say. In any event, many U.S. experts believe NATO needs the nuclear option to offset the superior conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact. A nuclear-free zone thus would hurt NATO more than it hurts the East Bloc, they say, and actually destabilizes Europe. “The United States remains opposed to the concept of nuclear-free zones in Europe, or in waters surrounding Europe, because we think such zones do not make a real contribution to preserving European security and stability,” the White House said late Thursday.