It’s perfectly feasible that in the 1980s a major diplomatic incident between nuclear superpowers could have been triggered by fish farts. In fact, Russia and Sweden nearly came to blows over this very thing. They just didn’t know it at the time.
Before we move on to farts, first, some background. In 1981, a Soviet submarine ran aground on the south coast of Sweden, just 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from a Swedish naval base. The Soviets claimed that they were forced into Swedish territory by severe distress, and later navigation errors, while Sweden saw it as proof that the then Soviet Union was infiltrating Swedish waters. It didn’t help that when Swedish officials secretly measured for radioactive materials using gamma-ray spectroscopy, they detected what they were 90 percent sure was uranium-23 (used for cladding in nuclear weapons) inside the sub, indicating that it may be nuclear-armed.
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