The Hunt for Red October?

There's been a great deal of news the past few days about sightings of some sort of a submarine in the Stockholm archipelago.

Enough credible information has come forward to cause the Swedish Navy to conduct an intense search in the area. One of the sightings, last Friday, was off of Runmarö, damned close to our own little island. It reminds me of the plot of "The Russians are Coming!"

The Local, Radio Sweden, and the Guardian all have good English-language summaries of what's going on right now. Even the Wall Street Journal published a good summary on their free site. There is, by all accounts, an intensive search in our archipelago.

Swedes have a sense of dèjá vu over all this. A well-remembered incident in 1981 found a Soviet submarine run aground very close to a Swedish naval base. There have been at least a dozen well documented sightings of submarines in Swedish waters (all presumed to be Soviet or Russian) since then.

Without dabbling in the political in this blog, it is apparent that Russia is flexing its muscles a bit. It would be no surprise to anyone in Scandinavia (or the Baltics) that Russian submarines are up to their Cold War tricks!