Cold War legacies in Russia’s Svalbard policy - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 22

in the Arctic. Should such data be relayed in real time from Svalbard to, say,
US military authorities, Russia's nuclear deterrence capability could, accord-
ing to Russian experts, be jeopardized (Gundarov 2002b:3).
In addition to the Globus II radar in Vardø on the Norwegian mainland
close to the Russian border, the installations that caused most concern in Russia
in the late 1990s were the EISCAT (European Incoherent Scatter Scientific
Association) Svalbard radar, the Svalsat (Svalbard Satellite) station and the
Ny-Ålesund rocket range. In Russian media reports and policy documents,
the space installations that were established on Svalbard in the mid-1990s
(the EISCAT radar, the Svalbard satellite station and the Ny-Ålesund rocket
range) were often mentioned in the same sentence as the Globus II radar in
Vardø and portrayed as 'proof' of increased Western military activity in the
Arctic under the cover of scientific research. The Russians' attitude at the
time fully represented the Russian Northern Fleet's former Chief of Staff Rear
Admiral Mikhail Motsak's article where he emphasized the following:
In recent years, a number of dual purpose installations have been deployed
in the region. The EISCAT radar, purportedly built to study atmospheric
anomalies, has been deployed near Longyearbyen. The station has the
capacity to monitor the flight paths of ICBMs and SLBMs in the Arctic.
Not far from it … a missile test site has been set up, including a run-
way that can be used by heavy transport aircraft, a space communications
center, a radar, a missile assembly and storage facility, and a mobile plat-
form for launching various types of geophysical rockets.
(Motsak 2000:8)
Russia's 'securitization' of the Norwegian space projects on Svalbard followed
a classic 'speech act' pattern. What was claimed to be at stake was the coun-
try's ability to strike the United States and its allies with SLBM launched
from Russian submarines operating in northern waters, or ICBM launched
from the Russian mainland. Interestingly, few of these security 'speech acts'
included a clear identification of countermeasures. Admiral Motsak advocated
a strategy of 'indirect action' [ strategiya nepryamikh deysviy ], an expression
often used in crisis situations to describe preventive and/or retaliatory meas-
ures other than entry into open armed confrontation. Others, like Dmitrii
Rogozin, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, indicated that the
Norwegian radar installations, 'according to the logic of war', could be wiped
out in the early stage of an armed conflict ( Strazh Baltiki 2000:6). The 'secu-
ritizing actors' were high-ranking, active-duty and retired military officers,
civilian members of the military and security establishment, defence journal-
ists and right-wing Duma deputies. The main 'audiences' seem to have been
the Russian Government and the Russian Security Council.
Concerning the foreign policy context at the time of the 'securitizing
moves', three developments in the mid- and late 1990s stand out as particularly