Word: kola
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Soviet forces frequently impinge on Norway, which constitutes the northern flank of NATO and is a key Western listening post for monitoring Russian military intentions. About three times a month, Soviet reconnaissance planes take aim at Norway's Finnmark province, which abuts Russia's Kola Peninsula with its strategic naval bases and 900,000-member complement of Communist ground and air forces. The spy planes turn back only when challenged by NATO interceptors. At least twice a year, large-scale Soviet naval exercises are held off the Norwegian coast. Soviet submarines, based at Murmansk, glide into Norway's deep fjords...
...commit more than 100 fighter-bombers, about half a dozen early-warning command-and-control aircraft and 1,800 Marines to battle on eastern Mediterranean shores in support of Greece and Turkey. From the North Atlantic's Second Fleet, planes could strike the mammoth Soviet naval facilities on the Kola Peninsula or dispatch amphibious landing forces to Norway to help blunt a Red Army invasion. One advantage of relying on carrier-based power, according to Senator Gary Hart, a Colorado Democrat who chairs the Military Construction and Stockpiles Subcommittee, is that "we may be evicted [from land airbases] with...
...official of the forced landing of Korean Air Lines' wayward Flight 902 after it had blundered into Soviet airspace on the night of April 20. Indeed, the full story of how the errant Paris-to-Anchorage-to-Seoul polar flight came to be fired upon over the strategic Kola Peninsula will probably be known only to the Soviets. But parts of the picture have begun to emerge, both from U.S. intelligence sources and from the 106 passengers and those crew members who finally were returned home early last week. The pilot and the navigator, who had been detained longer...
...Washington, the most intriguing aspect of the episode was the apparent sloppiness of Soviet air defenses on the Kola Peninsula, the site of a large naval base (at Murmansk) and important missile installations. The high-flying (35,000 ft.) Korean 707 should have been spotted by Soviet radar when it was as many as 500 miles offshore. Yet it not only flew unchallenged through the 200-mile-wide air defense zone that the Soviets maintain off their shores, but charged along for at least 18 minutes over Russian territory before fighters intercepted...
...were the Russian pilots so trigger-happy? Western experts speculate that the Soviets might have been more than normally jittery about security in the Kola Peninsula area because of an embarrassing incident that occurred a few weeks earlier: a light plane flown by a daredevil Swedish pilot landed on a lake near Leningrad to pick up three would-be Soviet defectors; although the rendezvous failed, the pilot managed to fly away scot-free...