Whisky on the rocks
Andrew Brown
Gothenburg They cannot have had an enjoyable time in the cold, dank darkness, waiting on a rock while their captain was interrogated. The gale that threatened to spill battery acid on the deck, and choke them all in chlorine gas, must have come almost as a relief since it assured them of some movement at any rate. But it now seems that the captain, when he withstood seven hours of interrogation on Monday without changing his story, only managed to condemn his crew to a further imprisonment in the hull. The Swedish government has decided that a new interrogation is necessary and that Swedish naval officers will probably have to inspect the submarine again. On Tuesday evening the Russian captain said that he was only willing in future to be questioned on his own boat. The Swedes agreed on condition that the questioning sessions were not attended by the two 'diplomats' who had been present at the first one. A further inspection of the submarine will reveal more than another interrogation anyway.
The 'Whisky' class submarine that ran aground on a skerry in the mouth of a narrow sound that leads towards one of the largest naval bases in Sweden may well have been only trying to map the area. The wilderness of shoals and skerries, islands, and unnamable lumps of granite which surrounds most Swedish harbours is extraordinarily difficult to navigate through. The militarily sensitive parts of these archipelagoes have not been officially mapped this century, and no foreign citizens are allowed into them at all. Even the areas which have been charted are very difficult to get through: in the last couple of years alone, a P and 0 container ferry ran aground 100 yards from a lighthouse outside Gothenburg, a passenger ferry to Amsterdam managed to hit the same rock twice in one week, and a Russian oil tanker was gouged open by a rock in the southern approaches to Stockholm. All these ships were trying to keep to a marked channel. The Russian tanker had even succeeded. The problem there was that the rock it hit, though detected in the Thirties, had not yet been added to the chart. When this was pointed out by a cartographer in the department responsible, his superiors promptly exiled him to the most desolate lighthouse in the Baltic. So there is no reason to doubt part of captain Gusjin's story — that his submarine ran aground because of a technical failure — but it is by the same token impossible to believe his claim that his gyrocompass failed in international waters. Without functioning navigational equipment, he could never have penetrated as far into the archipelago as he did.
Foreign interest in Swedish defences is nothing new, but seems to be unusually intense this year. A New Zealander employed by Sipri, the Stockholm peace research institution, and regarded by his co-workers as having a strong anti-NATO bias, spent his summer holidays cycling around the country, and making notes and sketches of all the military installations he could find. He has already been tried and sentenced for doing much the same thing in Norway, and has now been charged with the unauthorised possession of secret information here. A group of itinerant Polish picture-sellers have just been charged with espionage in southern Sweden. Last autumn, another foreign submarine (there may have been two involved) played hide-and-seek with the Swedish navy for some days in the archipelago outside Stockholm. It now seems likely that the purpose of this exercise was to find out whether the Swedes could force foreign submarines to leave their territorial waters. They couldn't, at least not in a hurry, partly because the Baltic is so shallow that it is quite easy for a submarine to park on the bottom, turn everything off, and outwait its pursuers.
The Swedish coastline, roughly 1000 miles long, is defended normally by three destroyers, 12 submarines, and 18 torpedo boats. Both the Polish and East German fleets are of comparable size, while the Russian Baltic fleet contains five cruiser's, six nuclear submarines armed with missiles that can reach England, 33 conventional submarines (32 at the moment, actually), 23 destroyers and 21 frigates. Foreign submarines are detected in Swedish waters about ten times a year, but one is only allowed to try and force them to the surface and escort them out to international waters, something that is very difficult to accomplish if the submarine does not cooperate. In the circumstances, the 12-mile limit is obviously a bad joke for most of its length.
But there are certain areas which really must be well defended if Swedish neutrality in wartime is to be taken seriously. It is no use having a top-secret, totally bomb-proof harbour for your fleet if the seabed outside has been strewn with mines or listening devices by an enemy submarine which is lurking outside to pick off any boat that emerges. Whisky 137 seems to have been spotted by two fishing boats cruising around the margins of the restricted area on the surface 48 hours before it ran aground. Once stranded, the submarine spent a minimum of 12 hours in the middle of the restricted area, apparently very close indeed to one of the most secret marine installations in the country, without being detected by the authorities. During this time, the boat was running its engines loudly enough to keep awake fishing families on an island nearly two miles away. They assumed that it was a Swedish naval exercise, and tried to go back to sleep. It was not until one of the fishermen noticed that the submarine was flying a Russian ensign when he passed it for the second time on Wednesday morning that he raised the alarm. After that, the authorities seem to have acted both quickly and decisively; but, if the submarine had not been so firmly stuck, there is nothing to suggest that they would ever have noticed that there was any need for action. The Minister of Defence, Torsten Gustafsson, did announce that the Navy would surely have found the submarine sooner or later, but his role in this affair has been only to provide light relief. He was conspicuously omitted from the group of ministers who have dealt with the crisis — he had previously shown his calibre by epitomising his view of Swedish defence policy in the phrase, 'luckily enough, we have the Finns'. He spent the weekend on his farm on the island of Gotland (he had been in Oslo when the submarine was discovered, and the government did not recall him from there) but this isolation did not prevent him from telling a television news programme that Sweden would under no circumstances use force in the affair, 3 statement which was promptly contradicted by the Prime Minister, and by the Commander-in-Chief.
On Thursday, another submarine was spotted in Swedish waters by a helicopter which had to return to base almost mediately afterwards to refuel. 'We have formed a task-force,' said a military voice on the radio, 'consisting of two helicopters, one armed with depth-charges and a hydrophone.' The submarine went away, but was this really a force sufficient to frighten a determined aggressor? One is reminded of the great submarine hunt last autumn, when it emerged that the only specialised hunter-killer boat in the country was laid up on the west coast, and had to sail all the way round to Stockholm before it could take part in the search at all.
In such circumstances, is Swedish neutrality credible at all? This is a question that makes usually reliable sources curdle. It can only be answered by distinguishing, as the Swedes do, between non-alignment in times of peace, and neutrality in a European war. The policy of non-alignment has come very well out of this affair. The Swedes have managed to inflict a major diplomatic humiliation on the Russians, and the Government's firm line has been extremely Popular here. There is political and economic profit to be gained in the Third World by striking carefully-judged antiAmerican poses, but these have not nearly the domestic popularity that standing up to Russia has. Swedish anti-Americanism is not based on any real resentment of American power or culture influence. It is rather the expression of a passion for that country, a feeling that America is so important and promising that Sweden is, or ought to be, its conscience. When, as in Vietnam, or during the last presidential elections, the Still small voice cannot make itself heard, it takes on an awful shrillness, but business goes on as usual under all the noise. And the Government was mortified to discover, in 1977, that a state-owned computer comPany had broken the embargo on strategic sales to Russia by smuggling to Moscow American printed circuits, which were two or three years ahead of communist technology, and which converted an airtraffic control radar for Moscow airport into a device that could detect military Planes as well. The Americans were infuriated by this, and when Caspar Weinberger was here a fortnight ago, he received lavish apologies for the affair.
But Swedish neutrality depends in the last resort on the country's ability to convince Potential invaders that the game would not be worth the candle. The Russians are obviously unconvinced, and NATO apparently plans to shoot Cruise missiles right across Scandinavia. Large parts of this country would be extremely difficult to fight a conventional war in, but the easily defensible Parts of Sweden are not, with the exception of Lappland, the strategically important ones. It would take any invader a surprising amount of time to subdue the whole country, but this in itself makes it hard for Swedes to take their country's defence as seriously as they might, for who nowadays believes that the next European war will not be over, one way or another, in a week or t wo?
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