Little Giants

As part of the largest display of peacetime might the 15-nation alliance has ever staged, NATO this week will hold naval maneuvers west of Norway. Last week, plunging into the chill northern waters first, the well-trained Soviet Arctic fleet began war games off Murmansk and the top of Norway.

Russia's northern force has suddenly emerged as the most significant of Russia's four fleets. Based on Polyarny, near Murmansk, and on Khabarovo, about 700 miles to the east, its four cruisers, 40-odd destroyers and 50 to 100 submarines (some of them missile-armed) are positioned to dominate the far northern approaches to Europe. In time of war the fleet would provide the stronger arm of the naval pincer (the Soviet Baltic fleet is the other) by which the Russians would try to neutralize Scandinavia and challenge Western transatlantic sea lines. It would also serve as a mobile missile base.

The Russian navy has historically been handicapped by geography--graphically illustrated this summer when a cruiser and two destroyers had to make the long and circuitous passage via the Dardanelles, Gibraltar and the Danish narrows simply to transfer from the Black Sea to the Baltic fleet.

In an earlier day, Russia's Arctic force would not have presented much of a challenge to the traditionally superior, heavier-armed Western navies. But in the age of missiles, a warship is as big as the rocket it fires--and submarines may yet turn out to be the capital ships of naval war. Izvestia has already boasted that "the destructive power of rocket artillery reduces the significance of larger vessels in future naval war." Some of the long-range Soviet missiles tested in the past year were reportedly fired from shipboard off Kolguyev Island. Moscow says ''modern weapons" will be used during the current maneuvers, and warns all ships, foreign and Soviet, to stay clear.

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