Swedish Politicians Talking About Creating Own Nuclear Weapons

Discussions about the need to develop its own nuclear weapons have resumed in Sweden amid global instability.

This is reported by The Times.

Following a series of recent articles in local newspapers, the country has been debating whether Sweden should make a new attempt to obtain a bomb, either on its own or in conjunction with its new European NATO allies.

Although this remains speculation at this point and there is no evidence that the government is serious about developing nuclear warheads, the topic has caused a wide resonance in political circles.

In March, Jimmie Akesson, leader of the right-wing Sweden Democrats party, whose support determines the fate of the ruling coalition, became the first prominent politician to express interest in the idea.

“Sweden has long had extensive experience in nuclear technology. But the political will required something else. I believe that all options should be considered in this situation,” he said.

A similar view is shared by Alice Teodorescu Mawe, a member of the European Parliament from the center-right Christian Democrats party, which is part of the current government. She suggests that Sweden should join a common European nuclear weapons strategy.

This is not an isolated European case. Poland has already requested to participate in the French and American nuclear deterrent systems, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk has hinted that Poland might consider developing its own nuclear weapons – although experts consider such a scenario technically and politically unlikely.

It remains unclear whether Sweden has sufficient technological and industrial resources to develop nuclear weapons without significant assistance from one of the existing nuclear powers.

The country has six nuclear power plants, which provide almost a third of electricity production, but the last one was built more than 40 years ago.

Swedish nuclear weapons – not a new idea

Sweden has a rich institutional history of considering this issue, including decades of covert nuclear policy planning during the Cold War, when it was officially neutral but secretly had a nuclear security guarantee from the United States.

For more than two decades after the end of World War II, this country, which was a model of pacifism and international non-proliferation, quietly sought the means to build an atomic bomb.

This began in 1945, when the country’s scientists were tasked with investigating what new weapons the United States had used in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1948, the Chief of Defense Staff commissioned a study of Sweden’s capabilities to acquire nuclear weapons and produce a plutonium-based atomic bomb. The country’s leaders at the time believed in armed neutrality – and that nuclear weapons might be necessary to preserve that neutrality.

In the following years, Sweden prepared to achieve its goal of producing nuclear weapons, and the project spread throughout the country. Uranium was mined in central Sweden, and two nuclear reactors were built: one in Agesta, south of Stockholm, and one in Marviken, outside Norrköping, although the latter was never put into operation. The plan was simple: plutonium would be produced by splitting uranium in nuclear reactors.

The country then conducted its own secret non-nuclear test explosions in Swedish Lapland. The most powerful of these included 61 tons of explosives.

By 1957, the CIA concluded that Sweden had “a sufficiently advanced reactor program to produce some nuclear weapons within the next five years.” Eight years later, analysts estimated that the country was only six months away from building a bomb.

However, the project had already begun to fade away. This was partly due to the strength of the anti-nuclear movement in Swedish society, partly to the enormous costs, and partly to secret security guarantees from the United States.