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Bargaining in the Baltic
Andrew Brown
Gothenburg It's nearly a year now since a Russian sub- marine, Whisky 137, was discovered so embarrassingly stuck on a skerry outside the Swedish naval base at Karlskrona. The rock itself would have become a tourist at- traction were not the whole area absolutely out of bounds to foreigners; a boatload of Danish tourists was caught and fined after ,8,.°1118 out to have a look at it. Meanwhile, the' Russians have continued to examine anYthing that takes their fancy. They have even been poking around in the Gulf of Bothnia, which cannot be reached except through Swedish or Finnish territorial waters, and which, once reached, contains nothing of any interest whatsoever. Since dune this year alone, there have been seven Publicly known contacts with foreign sub- Marines in the Baltic and the Gulf of Bothnia. On one of these occasions a Swedish helicopter attacked a submarine
bat d while a Finnish patrol °oat fired warning shots at another.
This sort of behaviour seems to discourage the Russians about as much as would the spectacle of the Foreign Minister that on to a chair and having hysterics. that would at least be more fun to watch ,,than the resolute inaction of the Ministry of Defence. This official inertia is all the more extraordinary because great technical ad- vances have been made since last year's scandal. It is now possible for the first time t° force detected submarines to surface so that they can be identified and then towed away. Two weapons are responsible for this change: 'Malin', a sort of sonar limpet mine which clamps itself on to enemy submarines and then broadcasts their position to the helicopters and ships that are hunting them; and 'Elm', a depth-charge which 'hakes submarines float. 'Elm' does this 1 Y blowing a very small hole in them: the
both explosion' can be used to hole uoth hulls without ripping the entire ship apart.
These weapons have already been ePloYed. 'Malin' has apparently been tested on the submarine that spent a fort- tight in August snooping around the minefields near Landsort, an islet on the southern fringes of the archipelago outside Stockholm and Soedertaelje. The mines ‘tere are permanently in position, so to pre- vent embarrassing bumps in the night they are controlled through a system of cables on the seabed which run up on to land. there are persistent reports, officially neither confirmed nor denied, that Swedish tr0°Ps are now scouring the islet of Land- ,°!'r'' for evidence that the submarine landed sp?es or saboteurs there to interfere with the [
mines' control system. A press conference is to be held after the election to clear up this story. It cannot be held before the election because the subject is politically inflamed,. The Moderate (conservative) Party has just published a report detailing the ways in which the Swedes most generously extend the freedom of their seabed to the Russian navy, and are using this to excoriate their former coalition partners, the Centre and the People's Par- ty. For, parallel with their naval operations, the Russians are mounting a diplomatic of- fensive to gain control of the seabed and the fishing between Gotland and what used to be East Prussia. (Kaliningrad, where Whisky 137 was based, used to be known as Koenigsberg, more famous for Kant than cant about 'the Sea of Peace'). The Swedes maintain that the boundary should run half-way between Gotland and the Russian mainland; the Russians would rather measure half-way between the Swedish mainland and their own. Only two months after the 'Whisky' embarrassment the government offered the Russians a large part of the disputed area, with the support of all parties but the Moderates. The Rus- sians turned down this offer, and the news of it was then leaked amid general recriminations. The coalition parties now loudly proclaim again their adherence to the principle of the central frontier line, but this is not as reassuring as it might be, since they claim never to have abandoned the principle, only the frontier itself. Swedish polticians tend to collect principles in the same way and for the same reasons that Monopoly players collect Monopoly money: abandoned at the right moment, they can be used to get out of a tight corner. The current Minister of Defence, Torsten Gustaysson, is himself a farmer from Gotland. His greatest contribution during the 'Whisky' crisis was generally reckoned to be his decision to spend the critical weekend looking after his farm there. But his pusillanimity in the negotiations over the disputed boundary so enraged his con- stituents, who stand to lose valuable fishing rights to the Russians, that he failed to be reselected in the Centre Party's primary elections earlier this year.
But some people never learn. 'Malin' and `Elma' are splendid weapons, but they are also the Swedish navy has got. At the beginning of the Seventies, the navy had 14 surface ships equipped for hunting sub- marines; only one now is left, and this is to be laid up again in November until the next war breaks out. The fixed seabed defences which used to protect especially sensitive areas have now rusted into uselessness, and have not been replaced. The navy has only ten of the large helicopters which are its sole really effective means of detecting enemy submarines, and these have many other duties. Under the circumstances, one can hardly blame the Russians for behaving as they do. What is especially worrying is that the government does not seem prepared to take even the limited action that is within its power.
A new directive which would allow the navy to force intruding submarines to sur- face and identify themselves even in peace- time has been approved by the Riksdag. The Ministry of Defence, however, claims that it cannot be applied until June next year. Apparently it takes that long to force any change of policy through the bureaucracies concerned. At that rate, when the next war breaks out, we will hear the order to run to our fall-out shelters in Russian. But the moderates, backed by the navy, claim that the new directive could come into force almost at once. This would raise once again the question of diplomatic immunity.
While 'Whisky' was on the rocks, the government knew, though the rest of us did not, that the submarine had nuclear weapons on board. An understandable reluctance to bring such devices into a Swedish harbour may have contributed to the still unresolved confusion over exactly how much of the diplomatic immunity usually enjoyed by vessels of a foreign navy in peace-time Whisky 137 was entitled to. But it is hard to see that a submarine poking around in another country's minefields should enjoy any immunity at all. Yet if the guiding principle of Swedish policy is in- deed what it now appears to be — to avoid all risk of loud undiplomatic explosions then the Russians must be laughing all the way to Sweden. Their fleet on and beneath the surface of the 'Sea of Peace', as they call the Baltic, contains nine different sorts of vessel that are almost certainly equipped with nuclear weapons at all times. It's enough to make anyone wonder why they are so enthusiastic about a 'nuclear-free zone' in Scandinavia.
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