As the multitude of threats and risks to the world inspire military and security experts to continue evaluating our today’s security environment, one thing is clear: the plethora of initiatives – national and international, private and public, military and civil – are reliant upon considerable amounts of time, money and expertise to appropriately react to dangerous security threats and to influence situations in the future. The more we learn and know about these threats, the more we want to work at a faster rate than was previously possible to find new tactics and methodologies to adapt them to the ever-changing security environment. This is the situation today, with Russia’s military offensive against Ukraine seen as an act of aggression that will make already worrisome tensions between NATO and Moscow even more dangerous. And this was the situation 40 years ago in the midst of the hot summer of 1983. At that time, Naval Forces continued to reflect upon NATO’s role and operations in the “Atlantic Area” – exactly one year after the end of the Falklands War. Vice Admiral James Andrew Fulton, who was appointed Commander Maritime Command of the Canadian Armed Forces in August 1980, noted in his “Strategy & Naval Policy” paper – dealing with the tasks of the Canadian forces in the North Atlantic Ocean – that the only potential major military threat came from the USSR. He stated that the major uncertainty in the Atlantic Area has been “in the form of the submarine, be it armed with intermediate-range ballistic missiles, anti-shipping torpedoes or mines”. And the threat posed by Soviet submarine forces was growing elsewhere in European waters, including the Baltic Sea and Mediterranean Sea. Official reports in May and June 1983 warned that Swedish territorial waters may have been violated by Soviet submarines over many years. An assessment released in 1998 – entitled The 1982 Hårsfjärden Submarine Incident: A Decision-Making Analysis – noted that “the submarine incidents of the 1980s shocked the foundations of the Swedish security policy, as they dragged this small neutral state into the Cold War”. The Editorial in Naval Forces III/1983 read that “a series of such episodes” may have forced the Swedish Submarine Defence Commission to shed light on events during the Hårsfjärden submarine incident in the southern Stockholm archipelago (October 1982) and to discuss conceivable motivations underlying such violations. The commission’s final report (26 April 1983) asked to what extent the Swedish military had available sufficient capability and capacity for anti-submarine warfare defence in peace-time and in a state of neutrality, to prevent against such threats in the future. Noteworthy, the ‘hype’ of Soviet submarine operations in Swedish waters has been between 1982 and 1986. Unsurprisingly, the Atlantic area of operations was a case in another Strategy & Naval Policy reportage by Ulrich-Joachim Schulz-Torge, a recognized expert in Soviet submarine tactics and technology at that time. The former officer of the German Navy provided an in-depth coverage of Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that were improving over time in deployability, availability, accuracy and range. There was much fear that these weapons could be used at intermediate range in a European scenario. Over years, the Soviet Union has consistently expanded its subsea forces operating in the North Atlantic Ocean and northern European waters, with a total of 62 submarines of various types carrying intermediate-range weapons – from the early SS-N-5 to the SS-N-20: The latter was test-fired for the first time from the first operational TYPHOON submarine on 14 October 1982. Although the number of Soviet weapons was limited under SALT I, the author provided detailed information (including five Tables) that the Soviet SLBM forces by 1987 would include a total of 3,128 warheads carried by 940 SLBMs and launched from 62 submarines, including five new TYPHOONs with SS-N-20 capability.
