U.S. AND RUSSIA RELEASE ONCE-SECRET ARCTIC DATA.

The U.S. and Russia yesterday released an enormous amount of scientific data about the Arctic Ocean that had been gathered by the two sides during the Cold War, primarily as intelligence in combating each others submarines. The information is in the form of a CD-ROM computer disk entitled "The U.S./Russian Atlas of the Arctic Ocean" and was published under the auspices of the commission chaired by U.S. vice president Al Gore and Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. The disk is but the first in a series. The information is also available on the Internet’s World Wide Web. Gore said that this first release more than doubled the unclassified information on the Arctic Ocean and contained more than 1,300,000 observations taken from 1948 to 1993. (VOA, January 14)

The Arctic Ocean remains an important operating area for Russian strategic submarines. A move seems underway to concentrate all of these assets in Russia’s Northern Fleet, where they would be deployed in a "Northern Strategic Bastion" under the Arctic ice.

Latvia Denies Considering Sale of Naval Base to Russia.