The submarine hunts or submarine incidents were a series of several incidents involving foreign submarines that occurred in Swedish territorial waters during the Cold War, attributed in Swedish media to the Soviet Union. On October 27, 1981, the Soviet submarine U 137 became stranded deep inside Swedish waters. The Swedish Navy responded aggressively to these perceived threats, increasing patrols in Swedish waters, mining and electronically monitoring passages, and repeatedly chasing and attacking suspected submarines with depth charge bombs, but no hits or casualties were ever recorded. This incident encouraged development of incident weapons to increase security of future submarine incidents. Reports of new submarine sightings and television imagery of Swedish Navy helicopters firing depth charges into coastal waters against suspected intruders became commonplace in the mid-to-late 1980s. They remain, for many Swedes, one of the iconic images of the Cold War and of the Swedish relation to the Soviet Union—for some underlining what was considered a major threat to Swedish sovereignty, while for others illustrating the tense atmosphere of the time. However, reports of these incidents are contested, and an intensive debate emerged early on. This debate unfolded somewhat, but far from exclusively, along leftwing/rightwing lines, and became tied up with the larger issues of relations to Moscow and Swedish armed neutrality. The Soviet Union consistently denied that it was responsible for violating Swedish waters, and claimed that the U 137 had only crossed the border because of navigational faults. Russia today maintains this stance. While the submarine sightings subsided with the fall of the Soviet Union, the debate about these events has reemerged sporadically. They have been the subject of a number of government investigations in Sweden, and continue to attract media attention.

List of major reported incidents

During the cold war

After the cold war

Alternative theory

Swedish researcher Ola Tunander attributes the majority of these incursions to be of NATO origin: "Following the stranding of a Soviet Whiskey-class submarine in 1981 on the Swedish archipelago, a series of massive submarine intrusions took place within Swedish waters. However, the evidence for these appears to have been manipulated or simply invented. Classified documents and interviews point to covert Western, rather than Soviet activity. This is backed up by former US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who stated that Western 'testing' operations were carried out regularly in Swedish waters with Swedish cooperation. Royal Navy submarine captains have also admitted to top-secret operations." Mattias Göransson, the author of the book “The Bear Comes”, which details previously suspected submarine violations that in hindsight proved to be something else, such as minke whales or shoals of fish, described the 2014 submarine chase as a “political meltdown”. He said the Swedish media had “about ten thousand chances” to learn to be more critical of claims of foreign powers’ submarines in Swedish waters. He said: “Over the past 40 years, about the same number of underwater intrusions were reported by the population. Despite this, the Navy has failed to present a single bit of sustainable proof of a single conscious Russian submarine infringement.”

Cultural influence

The incursions during 1982 and 1983 form a basis for the plot of The Troubled Man (Den orolige mannen), the final Kurt Wallander novel written by Swedish author Henning Mankell and published in 2009. Mankell considered the incursions to be one of the worst scandals in Swedish political history. Mankell's play Politik debuted in autumn 2010 and dealt with the submarine incidents. In 1984 a Finn living in Sweden published the satirical Finnish novel Probable Submarine (Todennäköinen sukellusvene) under the pen-name Klaus Viking. The work was later translated to Swedish as Sannolik u-båt by Paul Jansson. The novel is an examination of Swedish culture and politics as seen through the eyes of a Finnish immigrant who takes it upon himself to create some excitement by constructing a sham submarine and towing it through a restricted military area of the archipelago. It reflects a certain degree of amusement with which some segments of Sweden's neighbor populations regarded the country's recurrent searches for submarine violations of its territorial integrity.