N.A.T.O. begins sea exercise

Press, 30 August 1986, Page 11

N.A.T.O. begins sea exercise

NZPA-Reuter London

Service people from 10 N.A.T.O. countries are preparing today for the alliance’s biggest maritime exercise in eight years, and the Warsaw Pact is launching what senior Western officers said was a big intelligence operation to watch it. British and Dutch marines were embarking today aboard assault ships in the southern British naval port of Plymouth at the start of the threeweek exercise, which will stretch in an arc from the North Atlantic to the Baltic Sea. The key objective of the operation, codenamed Northern Wedding, is for an American carrier group, screened by a British anti-submarine task force, to escort an amphibious landing group to Norway for a mock fiveday battle with “enemy” forces, played by the Norwegians. But the whole exercise, by 150 ships ranging from the battleship U.S.S. lowa and the nuclear-powered carrier U.S.S. Nimitz to small chartered ' coastal merchant ships, would be carefully monitored by Soviet forces, N.A.T.O. officers said. Admiral Sir Nicholas

Hunt, chief of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s Channel Command, who is in charge of Northern Wedding, said he expected a big Soviet intelligence operation. “We are constantly looking at them, and they are constantly looking at us. We will take steps to deny them what we can.”

He had ordered his units to take avoiding action if it seemed there was a danger of anything being compromised by Soviet efforts. “I hope we will add to the sum total of our knowledge about them. I shall be disappointed if we don’t,” he said.

Making its debut in a big N.A.T.O. sea exercise will be H.M.S. Ark Royal, the latest in a series of Royal Navy ships bearing that name. It is a carrier equipped with a “skijump” deck and carrying Sea Harrier vertical takeoff fighter-bombers and Sea King anti-submarine helicopters.

The exercise, which has taken three years to plan, will include simulated attacks by United States Air Force Fill fighterbombers, 18 of which arrived in Britain from New Mexico this week.