Stumbled across this little anecdote this morning, somewhere down the click-hole:

… the armed forces of Sweden, for over a decade in the 1980s were bombing the living daylights out of their coasts because they were certain that what they heard through their acoustic sensors in the water were Soviet submarines. Millions of dollars, bombs, and efforts were spent to combat this insurgency. To verify that these sounds were indeed submarines, they also used SONAR imaging – where they saw one submarine splitting up into two, then into four, and then rejoining into one once again. Their military engineers were instructed to spend their efforts to build models of how these super-sophisticated submarines of the Soviets worked, and potentially replicate this technology.

Much later, spurred by the end of the Cold War not leading to these alleged submarines disappearing, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin denying the deployment of any submarines, the Swedish armed forces approached ecologists working on marine sounds. They quickly figured out that these sounds were only shoals of the herring fish releasing gas from their butts. This, of course, led to the severe embarrassment of the army that had been bombing these so-called submarines for years, costing the public exchequer millions of dollars. 

My instant thought was “yeah, that checks out”. You don’t have to be here long before you hear about the U137 incident—so there was at least an inciting event for the above-described paranoia. But I was somewhat surprised to discover that the peak period of probably-not-actually-a-submarine incidents coincided with a run of Social Democrat-led governments, and as such I now wonder whether the panics were at least partly aimed at provoking or upsetting them into a markedly more militaristic attitude.

It may, however, just be one of those deep-running cultural things, going right the way back to the C12th: Sweden fears the Russians in the same way that the English loathe the French, for the usual historical reasons.

That said, I still find the prevailing discourse around beredskap (“preparedness”, a typically Swedish euphemism) fairly silly. This too has deep cultural roots, to be fair, but the current version is fairly transparently the result of the incumbent right-wing government trying to push all the nationalism buttons while also providing plentiful investment for the country’s surprisingly large and successful arms industry.

It’s perhaps overly blithe of me, but I delight in pooh-poohing Swedish claims that Vlad the Inhaler has his eye on invading. “What credible enemy would dare invade this country,” I ask them, “and run the risk of provoking you into actually getting your shit together?”