Whisky on the Rocks
- Digitalmuseum.se
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October 27th, 1981, the Soviet submarine S-363 Whiskey-class submarine of the Baltic Fleet, became famous under the designation U 137 when it suffered the extreme embarrassment of having to surface within Swedish territorial waters after it accidentally struck an underwater rock 6.2 miles from the main Swedish naval base at Karlskrona.
Swedish naval forces swiftly reacted to the obvious breach of sovereignty, demanding an explanation from the captain who initially claimed that simultaneous failures of navigational equipment had caused the boat to get lost (despite the fact that the boat had accurately navigated through a treacherous series of rocks, straits, and islands to get so close to the Swedish naval base).
The Whisky Class Submarine incident became famously known as "Whisky on the Rocks"
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If sneaking into Swedish territorial waters and then getting caught with your pants down wasn't bad enough, the Swedish National Defence Research Institute sent in a secretly and specially configured Coast Guard boat equipped with a gamma ray spectrometer. Secretly measuring for radioactive materials from outside the hull, the Coast Guard crew detected something that was almost certainly uranium-238 inside the Soviet submarine, which was localized to the port torpedo tube.
She was Nuclear armed.
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The Soviet submarine and her embarrassed crew remained stuck on the rock for nearly ten days for all the world to see. On November 5th, she was hauled off the rocks by Swedish tug boats and unceremoniously escorted to international waters, where she was handed back over to the Soviet fleet.
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