Alva Myrdal, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 together with Mexico’s Alfonso García Robles was a strong voice in Sweden against the development of nuclear weapons. That Sweden once had a nuclear weapons program may come as a surprise to many historians used to the narrative about the country’s policy of neutrality coined in 1809 after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Sweden lost Finland to Russia; had to cede Pomerania to Prussia; King Gustaf IV Adolf was overthrown in a coup; and the kingdom renounced to a superpower status, accepting a more “middle power” role in the world.
Yet, after the end of World War II Sweden considered the development of nuclear weapons -due to the tensions of the Cold War- a decision that was cancelled in 1968. Sweden’s nuclear weapons program was revealed in 1985 when a journalist, Christer Larsson published conclusive information on the issue. Today it is known that once Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by the atomic bombs launched by the U.S. in August 1945, the former Sweden’s Research Institute for National Defense was instructed to analyze the possibility of developing nuclear weapons in the Nordic country.
Even though Sweden was a neutral country that decided not to become a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) founding member, neither a European Communities partner in the Cold War, it believed in armed neutrality, which would deter potential aggressors from attacking the Scandinavian territory. A study by the Sweden’s Research Institute for National Defense mentioned said Sweden had the economic resources and sufficient uranium deposits to make a nuclear weapon possible. In fact, Sweden did not want to rely on foreign assistance and planned on using plutonium that would be produced through the fusion of Swedish uranium in Swedish nuclear reactors using heavy water. Because Sweden was not physically destroyed during the war, thanks to its neutrality, it was in a much better shape to pursue the project as opposed to most countries in continental Europe.
As done by other countries that have developed nuclear weapons, Sweden started a nuclear initiative for civilian purposes that disguised the military program. Yet the necessity for energy was real, since the country needed to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, thus favoring the nuclear energy option in the 40’s.
Sweden’s nuclear arms program was not easy to develop since it was not done under the Atoms for Peace program launched by the US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, but independently and in isolation. It is understood that had the Soviet Union knew that Sweden was creating nuclear weapons, this could have been costly for the Scandinavian nation.
Declassification of documents in Sweden and the United States permitted that Thomas Jonter, Director of Stockholm University Graduate School of International Studies, Sweden, and Professor of International Relations at the Department of Economic History, publish a book in 2016 called “The Key to Nuclear Restraint: The Swedish Plans to Acquire Nuclear Weapons During the Cold War”, which explains in detail how close was the Nordic country to produce a nuclear bomb in the 60’s.
The plan consisted of producing around 100 tactic nuclear weapons, but the required infrastructure never became operational. The then Primer Minister of Sweden, Tage Erlander, was a physicist himself and it is known he frequently had conversations with Denmark’s Niels Bohr, a physicist, Nobel Prize winner in 1922. One key aspect that Erlander considered was how far nuclear disarmament conversations between the US and the Soviet Union could go. Sweden signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, although some nuclear facilities were kept secret from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as recent as 1994, 12 years after Alva Myrdal had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
In his memoirs, Erlander implies that the Swedish military establishment believed in a limited nuclear war, thus a small country could rely on nuclear weapons for its own protection. This is controversial because Erlander’s successor, Olof Palme, during his last government prior to his assassination in 1986, worked together with Mexico’s Miguel de la Madrid, Argentina’s Raúl Alfonsin, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere; Greece’s Andreas Papandreou, and India’s Indira Gandhi on a nuclear disarmament initiative labelled as the Group of Six known also as the Initiative of Five Continents, alarmed at the pace of the nuclear arms race of the US and the Soviet Union. These leaders expressed their concern on the second Cold War announced by the then US President Ronald Reagan, that led to a renovated nuclear arms race including the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) labelled by the media as “Star Wars”, a project to create a shell over the US territory to protect it against nuclear attacks coming from the USSR. The SDI would require nuclear tests in outer space, something that it is forbidden in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
Why is important to study the stance of Sweden on nuclear weapons? As suggested in Jonter’s book, the Scandinavian country decided to foster the development of nuclear weapons at a critical juncture and after that it became a strong advocate of disarmament. Today the disarmament of nuclear weapons is facing stagnation and there are nuclear powers like North Korea that suggests it cannot join a non-proliferation regime since the attacks of Russia against Ukraine show that had Kiev owned nuclear weapons, Moscow would have never invaded the country.
Sweden has been a NATO member since March 7, 2024, which provides the country with some “protection” against potential military actions from Russia. Yet, the threat posed by US President Donald Trump against Greenland has generated incertitude over the present and future of NATO. A second problem is the expiration of the New START Treaty last February 4, since in the past, a persuader of Sweden’s nuclear weapons program was the nuclear disarmament engagement between Washington and Moscow. Today, the nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia have the potential of rapidly increasing, thus creating a feeling of incertitude about the negative guarantees of security -meaning today it is not clear that non-nuclear countries would be exempted from nuclear attacks by those who own these weapons.
In 1973, as a result of the oil crisis, Sweden underlined the relevance of other energy options, among them, nuclear plants. After 1979, when the Three Mile Island nuclear accident happened in the United States, Sweden held a referendum on phasing out nuclear power plants in 1980. The plan was never fully implemented and even though hydropower represents a substantial percentage of the energy produced in the Scandinavian country, nuclear power is responsible for 40 percent, whereas wind power produces 15-20 percent and biofuels provide 25-26 percent of energy supply. So, basically, Sweden is fossil fuels free, but nuclear power with six operational reactors remains critical to satisfy the country’s energy needs.
What do Swedes think? Polls show a highly divided population on the use of nuclear energy for civilian purposes favoring other alternative energy options but still supporting nuclear energy. Could this lead to a change that may lead Sweden to return to the consideration of nuclear arms options? Only time will tell, but the fact that the U.S. and Russia do not seem to refrain themselves from increasing their stocks of nuclear weapons, does not help the international community to work on a nuclear weapons free world.
Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by María Cristina Rosas, a professor and researcher in the faculty of political and social sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. The column appears in The Rio Grande Guardian International News Service with the permission of the author. Rosas can be reached via email at: mcrosas@prodigy.net.mx
