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Bikini-clad women sipping vodka on an ocean liner in the Caribbean. Crates of computers being unloaded in Hong Kong harbor. A cruise ship offering three- month tours with elegant accommodations. These are not the images people conjure up when they think of the Soviet menace. But the Soviet Union's fleet of about 2,500 merchant ships, now the world's sixth largest, has been invading both cargo and cruise markets around the world, underbidding competitors by 40% and more. In the past two decades, the Soviet Union has doubled the number of its ships and tripled the tonnage...
Some nations see the Soviet practice of underbidding liner conferences, which are legally accepted price-fixing cartels, as deliberately predatory. When Britain took the Queen Elizabeth II out of commercial service to send troops to the Falkland Islands in 1982, the Soviets moved in and in two years upped their share of the British cruise market from 10% to 42%. In France, about 80% of imported oil is carried by Soviet tankers, while French ships transport less than 1%. Even the Japanese have been hurt. Since 1981, the Soviets have snatched an estimated 10% of the cargo trade between Japan...
...ship's bridge, damaged by a falling boom. These and other poignant images of disaster, all in Picasso blue, were distributed in Washington last week at a news conference held by Marine Geologist Robert Ballard, leader of the expedition that early this month located and photographed the sunken liner Titanic. They were only a few of the 12,000 photos shot at the bottom of the Atlantic by the unmanned submersibles Argo and Angus after they had been lowered 13,000 ft. beneath the waves from their mother ship, the U.S. Navy research vessel Knorr...
...couple of close calls, once hitting the bridge, another time brushing against a smokestack. Despite his initial alarm, neither the Argo nor the Titanic was damaged in these encounters. But in the process, the submersible collected the only artifact so far brought up from the great liner: a smudge of paint scraped from the smokestack. Ballard also disclosed that after "mowing the lawn" with highly advanced technological gear (sweeping his sonar back and forth and checking its soundings with a magnetometer), the expedition had actually located the Titanic with a "25-year-old echo sounder. It could have been done...
With so attentive an audience, Ballard, a devoted student of Titanic lore, could not resist bringing up a controversial subject: the actions of Stanley Lord, captain of the liner Californian, who Ballard said was definitely within reach of the sinking ship and may have ignored its white distress flares. Lord claimed at investigations of the tragedy that the Californian was more than 19 miles north of the sinking ship. "The Californian was inside of ten miles, perhaps as close as four miles," Ballard insisted, "and there is no doubt it could have gone in there and rescued those people...