A tale of two fleets: a Russian perspective on the 1973 Naval standoff in the Mediterranean

Naval War College Review, Spring, 2004 by Lyle J. Goldstein, Yuri M. Zhukov

The Soviets found ways to circumvent some of the treaty's restrictions. They skirted the eight-day waiting period on warships through the use of contingency declarations, which allowed Black Sea Fleet ships to augment rapidly the standing force in the Mediterranean during crisis situations. (23) For example, on 11 October 1973, during the Arab-Israeli conflict, a group of Soviet warships passed through the straits to make a port visit to Italy, its declared destination. Subsequently, however, the ships joined the other Soviet naval forces in the region. (24)

On the foreign-policy front, the Soviets also effectively exploited tensions between Turkey and its NATO allies, particularly Greece and the United States. For example, after Turkey dropped an alleged 340 kilograms of bombs and napalm on Greek Cypriot strongholds in northwestern Cyrus in August 1964, the U.S. president, Lyndon Johnson, and much of the international community publicly condemned Turkish involvement in that local crisis. Ankara responded by relaxing restrictions on passage of Soviet ships through the straits; shortly afterward, the Soviets moved a cruiser and two destroyers into the Mediterranean from the Black Sea. (25) Later, the Soviets further exploited Turkey's easing of the regulations, in response to U.S. support for Israel. This situation helped facilitate Soviet operations during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, specifically the airlift and sealift to Egypt and Syria, and the rapid reinforcement of the Fifth Eskadra by Black Sea Fleet forces.

THE BROADER CONTEXT

Although Moscow had initiated arms transfers to Egypt as early as 1955 (thereby extending Soviet influence into a vacuum left by Britain) and had established a brief naval presence in the Aegean Sea thanks to the use of Albanian ports in 1959, it was not until the American deployment of Polaris submarines in March 1963 that a forward naval presence in the Mediterranean became a central national security interest for Moscow. (26)

Polaris

On 14 April 1963, the USS Sam Houston (SSBN 609) visited the Turkish port of Izmir, in the first Mediterranean patrol ever made by a ballistic missile submarine. The submarine, armed with Polaris missiles, was capable of delivering an explosive yield greater than the combined bomb tonnage dropped in World War II by Allied and Axis powers (including the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). (27) The missile's range (2,800 kilometers for A-2 missiles, four thousand for A-3), underwater launch capability, and mobility made Polaris a milestone in the Cold War nuclear deterrence calculus. A ballistic missile fired from the eastern Mediterranean could thus potentially hit Moscow or Leningrad. (28) Such a threat was not entirely new to Moscow--the first Polaris submarine, USS George Washington (SSBN 598), had completed three patrols off Russia's northern coastline by mid-1961. (29) However, Polaris submarines patrolling in those waters, home to the Northern Fleet, were considerably more vulnerable to Soviet ASW operations than were those in the Mediterranean. In light of its strategic weakness in the new area of U.S. ballistic missile deployment, the Kremlin prioritized the creation of a permanent counterforce in the Mediterranean. In the words of a former British defense intelligence officer,