Sweden’s difficult neutrality

Press, 6 September 1984, Page 20

Sweden’s difficult neutrality

Sweden would like to side-step the challenge posed by intelligence-gathering Soviet submarines that invade its territorial waters; but Sweden’s “porcupine” neutrality remains credible only as long as the country is prepared to defend its territorial integrity. THOMAS LAND, author and freelance journalist, writes from Britain on an issue that will be debated hotly at the conference of Sweden’s ruling party this month.

Sweden is about to escalate the electronics war against the intelligence-gathering Soviet submarines that regularly invade its restricted territorial waters, but hopes to avoid violent confrontation with them. The embarrassed Swedish navy knowns that it may have to sink a Soviet submarine in order to defend the credibility of the national policy of armed neutrality which has kept the country out of war for nearly two centuries.

A report submitted to the Government by the supreme commander of the Swedish armed forces records 600 suspicious indications within the space of three months this year in the restricted Karlskrona archipelago, 70 of which .are considered to have no possible explanation other than alien underwater operations. The issue will be hotly debated in the congress of the ruling Social Democrat Party this month. The archipelago is the site of the country’s principal southern naval base housing shipyards, the headquarters of the coastal artillery,, military colleges and — most important in the electronic warfare of the Baltic Sea — an advanced listening centre monitoring the movement of Soviet ship-

ping in and out of the North Atlantic. Another centre of suspicious alien underwater activities is Musko, Sweden’s main Baltic listening post. It was at Karlskrona that an ageing Whis-key-class Soviet submarine ran aground in November, 1981. Telltale tracks of midget submarines have been found on the seafloor at Musko.

Submarines are clever listening devices capable of collecting radar, radio, and even microwave telephone intelligence with a high degree of safety and discretion. They are also relatively noisy; they can be pinpointed with deadly accuracy by a new generation of hydrophones spaced out on a cable towed by a ship or dropped in the sea by aircraft. These “marine ears,” as the Swedish navy calls them, are sensitive enough to identify even the number of cylinders in the silenced diesel engine of a lurking submarine. A single submarine hunt can require the deploydreds of hydrophones. They would come into play after the initial detection of a submarine by one of a fleet of newly-equipped naval patrol aircraft packed with sophisticated listening and scanning devices. Swedish specialists speak of

scanners registering magnetic disturbances caused by submarines, infra-red cameras measuring the turbulence in their wake, and radar capable of identifying targets within; a radius of 200 kilometres. Far from being secret, these impressive innovations are being publicised by the worried Swedes in their technical and scientific press in the hope that they may never be used. The armed forces are under order to “fire at will” at the intruders in the sensitive, restricted areas — and the last thing

the sensible Swedes want to do is to sink a Soviet submarine. Indeed, in the “Whiskey on the rocks” incident, the reluctant Swedish navy was conducted to the stranded submarine by insistent local fishermen. For Moscow, the submarine game of hide-and-seek is a matter of electronic intelligence gathering while exploiting the training opportunities of the difficult, hostile, western coastline of what it considers to be a Soviet lake. Its policy flouts Sweden’s stance of ’“porcupine” neutrality, the essence

of the country’s approach to survival in an insecure world. That approach remains credible only so long as Sweden is prepared to defend its territorial integrity. The protection of the coastline is crucial because Sweden has staked its national security on its ability and willingness to defend its territory from being used by any combatant in a European or global war. Every invading Soviet submarine carries the obvious, challenging message to the Swedish navy that Moscow is not con