An incident weapon is typically an anti-vehicle device intended to inflict disabling damage or prevent escape without killing the vehicle operators. Incident weapons were used by military personnel during the Cold War to discourage clandestine use of submarines within

territorial waters The term territorial waters is sometimes used informally to refer to any area of water over which a sovereign state has jurisdiction, including internal waters, the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone, and potent ...

without causing casualties which might escalate into warfare.

Historical use

The

Baltic Sea The Baltic Sea is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that is enclosed by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Sweden and the North and Central European Plain. The sea stretches from 53°N to 66°N latitude and ...

was a vital access route for

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

shipping to reach the

Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe ...

. Both

Warsaw Pact The Warsaw Pact (WP) or Treaty of Warsaw, formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist repub ...

and

NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two No ...

had a strategic interest in possible blockades of that access. The western shore of the Baltic is controlled by neutral Sweden. Swedish submarine incidents occurred as foreign submarines explored Swedish territorial waters to assess the feasibility of evading future blockading warships and

naval mine A naval mine is a self-contained explosive device placed in water to damage or destroy surface ships or submarines. Unlike depth charges, mines are deposited and left to wait until they are triggered by the approach of, or contact with, any ...

fields.

Examples

The United States developed a modified

Hedgehog A hedgehog is a spiny mammal of the subfamily Erinaceinae, in the eulipotyphlan family Erinaceidae. There are seventeen species of hedgehog in five genera found throughout parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and in New Zealand by introductio ...

projectile substituting a

magnet A magnet is a material or object that produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field is invisible but is responsible for the most notable property of a magnet: a force that pulls on other ferromagnetic materials, such as iron, steel, nicke ...

and clapper for the explosive charge. If the magnet stuck to the submarine hull, flow along the hull as the submarine moved through the water caused the clapper to oscillate hammering against the hull. Sweden deployed several incident weapons in 1983 to discourage such exploration after ran aground while exploring Swedish waters in 1981.

''Elma''

''Elma'' was a small bomb intended to be dropped by aircraft or ships in patterns similar to Hedgehog. If one of these bombs landed on the submerged submarine, a

would position it on the hull to focus a

shaped charge A shaped charge is an explosive charge shaped to form an explosively formed penetrator (EFP) to focus the effect of the explosive's energy. Different types of shaped charges are used for various purposes such as cutting and forming metal, ini ...

capable of making a small hole in the pressure hull. The amount of water entering the submarine in shallow coastal waters was intended to encourage the submarine to surface.

''Malin''

''Malin'' was similar to ''Elma'', but substituted an acoustic transmitter for the shaped charge to simplify tracking under difficult

sonar Sonar (sound navigation and ranging or sonic navigation and ranging) is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in submarine navigation) to navigate, measure distances (ranging), communicate with or detect objects on o ...

conditions in coastal waters.

Torpedo

The standard Swedish Torped 42 anti-submarine

torpedo A modern torpedo is an underwater ranged weapon launched above or below the water surface, self-propelled towards a target, and with an explosive warhead designed to detonate either on contact with or in proximity to the target. Historically, s ...

warhead was replaced by a smaller explosive charge intended to merely damage submarine propellers or

rudder A rudder is a primary control surface used to steer a ship, boat, submarine, hovercraft, aircraft, or other vehicle that moves through a fluid medium (generally air or water). On an aircraft the rudder is used primarily to counter adve ...

s after

acoustic homing Acoustic homing is a system which uses the acoustic signature (sound) of a target to guide a moving object, such as a torpedo. Acoustic homing can be either passive or active in nature. Using passive homing, the system is designed to move either ...

Sources

{{reflist Non-lethal weapons Weapons of Sweden