Sweden pumps billions into submarine hunt for fear of going under

Sputnik News

The Swedish Government has announced it is to spend billions of its defence budget ramping up its anti-submarine capability and re-activating a military base on the Baltic island of Gotland in a sign of increasing paranoia.

In October 2014, Sweden launched a huge military operation after a sighting of what it thought was a Russian submarine in Kanholmsfjärden in the Stockholm archipelago. Over the following days there were over a hundred apparent sightings, but nothing was ever found.

The Swedish Navy has put on dozens of searches for foreign submarines apparently spotted, since the early 1980s, however, these searches found nothing. In one case, a suspected submarine turned out to be a raft frozen in moving ice.

Faced with the embarrassment of never having caught a foreign sub, the Swedish Government has now said it will spend SEK 6.2 billion (US$690m) increasing anti-submarine capabilities and building up military forces on the Baltic island of Gotland, which has been demilitarised since 2005.

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