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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# UNCLASSIFIED # Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1992 Document 3 of 12 commander of the submarine U-137. 27. I will leave the captain 3d rank's assertion that an order was received to blow up the submarine to his own conscience. It would be impossible to document the existence of such an order today because no such documents exist in the archives. I can only say as a specialist that the Gushchin had no possibilities for doing so. There could have been only 20 high-explosive grenades aboard the submarine; naturally they could have wrecked considerable havoc, but they couldn't of course have caused the explosion of a 1,350-ton submarine made of especially strong ship steel capable of withstanding a pressure of 25 kilograms per square centimeter. 28. Nor could a torpedo have been exploded, because special safety mechanisms make detonation of a torpedo inside a torpedo tube impossible. And a torpedo tube can't be blown up by an external charge because it is stronger than the ship's hull. Therefore an order to blow up the submarine seems quite unfulfillable to me. 29. I might suppose that Gushchin received instructions to knock out secret equipment-radios, torpedo firing instruments, cryptographic equipment. A grenade would have been enough for that job. But nothing else could have been blown up. 30. Was the submarine carrying a torpedo fitted with a nuclear warhead? Apparently it was. Submarines carried such torpedoes on the Baltic in those days. But even so, the warheads of these torpedoes have their own safeguards against unsanctioned detonation. These safeguards won't fail even if the torpedo itself blows up. 31. In October 1986, during the accident aboard the Soviet submarine in the Atlantic, a missile tipped with a nuclear warhead exploded. The explosion blew off the lid of the missile shaft and ejected part of the missile into the sea, but the warhead didn't operate-its activation was protected by a special code. 32. Then there is one last thing that casts doubt upon the truthfulness of the words of the captain 3d rank. When a submarine is resting on the bottom in shallow water, it makes no sense to blow it up in order to conceal or hide something. All of it would still be there at the surface, and it wouldn't be hard for specialists to reach conclusions about its design and what was in it. 33. Now about the minisubmarines. A great deal of what the newspapers say about them is far-fetched. There were only two of them, built by Leningrad's Admiralteyskoye Association. The decision to build them was made in the early 1980's, and the plan was to make them multipurpose, but the concept failed. Lack of coordination
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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.