The Stranded USSR Submarine in Sweden and the Question of a Nordic Nuclear-Free Zone

Abstract

Leitenberg, M. The Stranded USSR Submarine in Sweden and the Question of a Nordic Nuclear-Free Zone. Cooperation and Conflict, XVII, 1982, 17-28.

The stranding of a Soviet submarine on the south Swedish coast and within the security perimeter of one of Sweden's major naval bases at Karlskrona had a major impact on the public and political debate on the question of a Nordic Nuclear-Free Zone (NFZ). The suggestion for a Nordic NFZ has been a recurrent one for over twenty years. The proposals exist in various forms, but all of them contain two major impediments to their being considered realistic: the exclusion of the Baltic, and the problem of Soviet nuclear weapons on the Kola Peninsula, in the USSR's Northern Fleet, and other USSR nuclear weapons capable of being used against targets in the Nordic region. The submarine stranding directly engaged these questions when Sweden announced that it believed the USSR submarine contained one or more torpedoes armed with a nuclear warhead. This focused attention on the kinds and numbers of nuclear weapons carried by Soviet ships in the Baltic and in the Northern Fleet: torpedoes, submarine launched ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles launched by submarines and surface vessels. The numbers of these in the two fleets are quite substantial. The stranding also meant that the USSR had brought a nuclear weapon within the territory of a non-nuclear weapon state, though the stranding itself can be assumed to have been inadvertent.