It was a fisherman who accidentally discovered the Soviet diesel submarine in Gåsefjärden in October 1981.

It had got stuck on a ground in the middle of a military protection area and tried to drive loose all night and the next morning.

The Soviet submarine did not state that it was in distress at sea and it took many hours before the Armed Forces were alerted.

Sweden thus ended up in its most serious crisis with the Soviet Union after they shot down a Swedish spy plane over the Baltic Sea in the 1950s.

The submarine got the popular name "Whiskey on the rocks" because the model was Whiskey.

The Soviets claimed that the submarine had the designation U137, but it was actually called S363.

The name U137 was made up.

U did not exist in the Soviet submarine alphabet.

The crew claimed that there was a fault in the navigation equipment, which the Swedish authorities strongly doubted.

High-ranking Soviet intelligence officers were on board.

The press conference with Prime Minister Torbjörn Fälldin attracted worldwide attention when he stated that the submarine most likely had nuclear weapons on board.

Today, almost 40 years later, it is still unclear whether it was nuclear torpedoes or nuclear mines or both.

One thing is certain.

The Soviet Union had that capacity in the Baltic Sea.

Captain, Anatoly Gusjjin (left) commander of the Soviet submarine S363 and Commander Karl Andersson who participated in the interrogations of the crew.

Photo: Andi Loor / Reportagebild / Scanpix 2 November 1981

Thousands of submarine alarms

After S363, the Swedish people heard and saw submarines everywhere.

Thousands of alarms were reported during the 1980s and 90s.

The great submarine hunts began, but ceased after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Then suddenly in the autumn of 2014, a submarine hunt started again outside Stockholm.

It was like a repeat of the Cold War - the Armed Forces spoke of an "intelligence operation".

And old wounds are still being torn up when new information about the submarines is published.

The same questions are asked again.

The same questions that have been asked for 40 years.

Which submarines violated Swedish territory and why?

Is there any evidence of submarine violations at all?

And every time the "submarine issue" ends up in the headlines, different factions collide.

The issue is almost as charged as the unsolved assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme or the sinking of the ferry Estonia.

Coastal corvette HMS Visby on its way from the reconnaissance area in Nämdöfjärden to the navy's base at Berga in connection with the intelligence operation Örnen.

Photo: Fredrik Sandberg / TT 22 October 2014

Mink, herring and more

The main reason why the submarine issue became a red veil is that the Armed Forces presented certain evidence, which on later examination does not hold.

Herring, mink and SMHI's weather buoy were thought to be foreign submarines - among other things.

Recently, the question was raised again when a former chief of the Swedish Armed Forces' Underwater Analysis Center (Musac) said in a documentary on SVT that there is no audio evidence of established submarine violations.

He took up the post after the Cold War.

His representatives during the Cold War, who had close contacts with their colleagues in certain NATO countries, told SVT long before that there was evidence of foreign submarines from both the then Warsaw Pact and NATO countries and emphasized that 99 percent were false alarms. 

It is a scenario that former Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson (S) described in his memoirs, as did a former US Secretary of Defense (Caspar Weinberger) and a British Secretary of the Navy (Sir Keith Speed), told SVT in 2000.

Weinberger's statement became world news.

He was also supported by Sir James Walker, the former head of the British military intelligence service.

After the end of the Cold War, even former Soviet submarine officers told of submarine operations they had carried out in the Baltic Sea "in the waters of foreign lands."

The last chapter in the "submarine issue" has not yet been written and it will probably continue to be a wound that does not heal.

Minister of Defense Peter Hultqvist (S) after the Defense Committee's meeting with ÖB due to the submarine hunt in the Stockholm archipelago.

Stock Photography.

Photo: TT 21 October 2014