Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS translation, dated 29 January 1992, reproduces an IZVESTIYA article by Marat Zubko about Soviet submarine U-137, which ran aground near the Karlskrona naval base in Sweden on 27 October 1981. It reports former commander Anatoliy Gushchin's claims that the submarine carried nuclear weapons and that he had orders to blow it up. It also quotes Swedish commander Karl Andersson likening claims of submarine incursions to flying saucers. Captain 1st Rank Vladimir Vazhov disputes the order claim and describes two Soviet minisubmarines.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1992 Document 3 of 12 Page 2 Baltic Fleet's submarine unit, who presented a somewhat different version of those events on the basis of his investigation. 5. In his words, there had been no direct order to blow up the submarine, although according to military regulations the crew 'should have done everything possible to deny access of unauthorized persons to the unit's territory, and the submarine was a separate unit.' Bulakhtin also made a statement that I personally didn't fully understand: '...given the statements of foreign mass media that nuclear weapons were aboard the submarine, only a madman could have given the order to blow it up.' 6. It is strange that having conducted an investigation of the incident, when it comes to nuclear weapons he cites the foreign press, as if he himself had seen nothing! But that's not what's important. Here is what remains unclear: The press carried the statements of two witnesses who for some reason offered a different interpretation of the events. And then a third spoke up, painting a picture that would make your hair stand on end. 7. This third person was the former commander of the submarine U-137, Anatoliy Gushchin, a captain 3d rank in the past, and now retired at 45 years. Swedish journalists found him in Estonia and asked him to appear on the popular Robert Ashberg show. And so, here is what Gushchin said: 8. First, the submarine that ran aground under his command in a fjord not far from the Swedish naval base at Karlskrona on 27 October 1981 was carrying nuclear weapons. 9. Second, the command had in fact been ordered to blow up the submarine if need be. 10. Can you imagine? Blow up a submarine with nuclear torpedoes! This means that in those days Europe was on the brink of catastrophe. Who was it that gave such an order? In A. Bulakhtin's words only a madman could have done so. But this means that he did exist, if what the former commander of the submarine said was true. 11. During the program the host of the show tried to find out from A. Gushschin how high the yield of the nuclear weapons was. The captain didn't give exact figures, but he did say that it was high enough to destroy an entire enemy squadron under the right circumstances. And he added that while these nuclear weapons could destroy a harbor, they could hardly destroy entire cities. 12. The Swedes estimated that in such a case the U-137 was carrying 5-10 kiloton tactical nuclear warheads, which is what torpedoes were
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 7 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.