Managing Asymmetrical Crisis: Sweden, the USSR, and U-137

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Abstract
Much of the leading work on international crisis suffers from an implicit bias favoring analysis of crises in which the protagonists are great/superpowers with roughly comparable levels of gross military capabilities. As a result, it is unclear whether the crisis management prescriptions derived from this experience base can be usefully applied to crises characterized by highly asymmetrical gross military capability structures, i.e., superpower versus small state. In this paper, central prescriptions from the crisis management literature are applied to the 1981 U-137 (“Whiskey on the Rocks”) crisis involving Sweden and the USSR as a first step in exploring this concern. The analysis focuses on the crisis management problem from the point of view of the smaller state. Empirical manifestations of capability asymmetry are discussed, as are compensating asymmetries which may mitigate a seemingly unfavorable military capability structure. Tentative observations of a small state “crisis management style” are submitted as a preliminary knowledge base for improving our understanding of the increasingly important asymmetrical crisis management problematique.

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