Cold War legacies in Russia’s Svalbard policy - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 24

The proposal was raised again after the war, at the Peace Conference in Paris in
August 1946, but was eventually put to rest the following year. Throughout
the 1950s and 1960s, however, Norway was frequently faced with Soviet
accusations of Treaty violations aimed at undermining the Soviet Northern
Fleet's combat potential.
Soviet reactions to the inclusion of Norway's northernmost territories
(Svalbard including Bear Island and the island of Jan Mayen) in the com-
mand area of the Atlantic Pact in 1950-1951 followed a similar pattern.
The Soviet Government maintained that the arrangement was a direct
breach of the demilitarization clause of the Svalbard Treaty. Norway
responded that no military fortifications or bases had been established on
the archipelago and that the country would not allow any state to do so
(Østreng 1977:54-5). Thus, in the Norwegian view, the Svalbard Treaty
obligations had been upheld. Not reassured by the Norwegian response,
the Soviet Government reiterated in a diplomatic note dated 12 November
1951 that it was 'unable to recognize the act as legal' (Østreng 1977:55)
and continued to be concerned about the possibility of military use of the
archipelago by Norway and/or its NATO allies.
The most striking historic parallel to the securitization of the Svalbard
radar issue in the 1990s was the 1965-1969 debate between the Soviet Union
and Norway concerning the Norwegian decision to let the European Space
Research Organization (ESRO) establish a telemetric station at Kongsfjord,
not far from the settlement of Ny-Ålesund . 5 The station, which was set up
for civilian research purposes to receive and transmit signals from orbiting
satellites, was seen in the Soviet Union as a military-purpose, intelligence-
gathering installation:
The Soviet Government is … of the opinion that the telemetric station in
Svalbard, apart from its purely scientific purposes, could be used for mili-
tary purposes, in particular for carrying out cosmic, radio-technological,
and other forms of intelligence-gathering activity over the territory of
the Soviet Union and that its real tendency can only be determined by
constant surveillance by Soviet experts.
(Soviet memorandum of 30 April 1969, cited in Østreng 1977:58)
While the statement regarding the Kongsfjord station in 1969 was made
by a semi-official group of Russian security policy experts, rather than by an
official government source, the Soviet reactions were similar: 'Russia cannot
allow itself not to worry that these objects, in the event of a U.S. withdrawal
from the ABM Treaty, will become important elements in a national missile
defence system' (Fedorov et al . 2001:3).
There are many similarities between these issues and the issues that have
dominated Russia's post-Cold War Svalbard agenda; the current pattern of
securitization is in reality not very different from the Cold War pattern, and