TV news: Finns provided intelligence to U.S. nuclear interests during Cold War
Proximity to Soviet test sites a major advantage in monitoring
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According to the Finnish Broadcasting Company's digital channel for news and current affairs YLE 24, new information has come to light on intelligence collaboration between Finland and the United States during the Cold War years.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. recruited several eminent Finnish scientists to assist in clandestine research on nuclear arms and Soviet nuclear testing. Among other tasks, the Finnish scientists monitored the Soviet nuclear test programme, drafted calculations for the flight routes of intercontinental bombers, and plotted trajectories for missiles - ICBMs - aimed at targets inside the Soviet Union.
In a trailer for a report on the subject to be screened later today, YLE 24 noted that in the early 1960s the Department of Seismology at the University of Helsinki was discreetly provided with U.S. equipment to help in monitoring Soviet nuclear tests.
The information gathered was passed back via Norway and then uplinked using the U.S. Defense Department's so-called Arpanet network, the military forefather of the modern Internet. At the time the United States feared that the Soviets were gaining an advantage in the development of battlefield nuclear arms, or small tactical weapons.
One of the principal players was the Department of Seismology's founder, Prof. Eijo Vesanen, who had spent four years shortly after World War II engaged on military research programmes in Washington State. The Finnish measuring apparatus was part of an extensive network of seismographic monitoring stations with which the U.S. had ringed the Soviet Union.
Finland was an important node, since the country is located on the same continental plate as the Kola Peninsula and the key Soviet nuclear testing area in the twin islands of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean.
Finland also enjoyed conditions with little "seismological background noise", thus rendering the results more accurate. Furthermore, our geographical proximity to the testing sites meant that seismic waves reached Finland relatively quickly, thereby assisting spy satellites in pinning down the exact location of an underground nuclear test.
YLE goes on to divulge that Veikko Heiskanen, a Finnish professor of geodesics, led a research department in Ohio that was funded by the U.S. intelligence community and which concentrated on missiles and surveillance satellites.
The research team explored such things as ways in which nuclear-armed missiles could be guided in to designated targets in Leningrad, Moscow and elsewhere within the USSR.
Information on the role of Finnish scientists during the Cold War era is not exactly thick on the ground.
Many of the details of projects from this time remain classified, or material has been lost or deliberately destroyed, and those who do know something are reluctant to speak publicly about it.
The most obvious reason for secrecy at the time was the fact of Finland's close security position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union through the YYA Treaty [The Treaty of Cooperation, Friendship and Mutual Assistance, dating from 1948].
Cooperation with the West was thus a politically sensitive issue, and was kept very much under wraps, on a need-to-know basis. Very few people needed to know anything.
A more comprehensive report on the subject is to be broadcast tonight, Monday, on the A-Piste current affairs programme on YLE's TV1, at 21:00.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 18.12.2006 - TODAY |
 TV news: Finns provided intelligence to U.S. nuclear interests during Cold War
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