thersites | April 22, 2020
Background:
In the early 1980s, Sweden was haunted by several hundred sightings of mysterious submarines, causing much panic in public opinion and greatly embarrassing the non-aligned Social Democrat government led by Olof Palme and its efforts to create detente in Europe.
In 1981, a Soviet submarine had run aground in Swedish territorial waters, and the Soviets consequently got blamed for every subsequent sighting over the nest half decade,
10 years later, high ranking US and British officials causally revealed in interviews that NATO had sent submarines into Swedish waters – with the Swedish Navy High Command being informed of the matter, but with neither the Swedish militar brass nor US/UK/NATO informing the elected Swedish government.
After the assassination of Olof Palme in 1986 and the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, the sightings disappeared – only for the submarines turn up again in 2014, during the New Cold War.
(Director; Dirk Pohlmann)