The rise and fall of Sweden’s nuclear disarmament advocacy

In the nine months since joining NATO, Sweden has not wasted any time integrating itself tightly into the transatlantic alliance. On September 16, Sweden doubled down on its commitment to a nuclear weapons-based military alliance when Sweden and Finland agreed that Sweden would lead a new NATO defense base to be established in northern Finland.

While Denmark and Norway currently do not want to host nuclear weapons on their own soil, NATO’s new entrants have both signaled an openness to doing so. In June, the Swedish parliament ratified a Defense Cooperation Agreement granting the United States access to 17 Swedish military bases, and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson did not rule out hosting nuclear weapons during wartime. Meanwhile, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb has advocated for a legislative change to allow the transportation of nuclear weapons.

With the benefit of historical hindsight, it is clear that this was not an inevitable outcome. Sweden was once a nuclear aspirant with an advanced weapons program, but just a few decades ago, Stockholm and Helsinki sought to keep nuclear weapons out of northern Europe. In the depths of the Cold War, Stockholm proved willing and capable of advancing ambitious, albeit inconsistent, goals when it came to nuclear weapons in Europe. Sweden’s history suggests that disarmament ideas—such as a Nordic nuclear weapon-free zone—were never completely written off, even if they are difficult to imagine in Europe today.

Pursuing Nordic disarmament. Calls for the establishment of a Nordic nuclear weapon-free zone (NWFZ) did not originate in Sweden but rather in neighboring Finland. Though Swedish Foreign Minister Östen Undén had, in 1961, already proposed the idea in a general manner, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen formally proposed it in 1963.

Earlier that year, Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito had expressed his support for a Balkan NWFZ, which Kekkonen saw as strengthening the case for a Nordic zone. In an address on May 28, 1963, Kekkonen argued that the Nordic countries already constituted a de facto NWFZ, with no country officially pursuing or possessing any nuclear weapons.

While the Swedish government was officially supportive of nuclear disarmament and the creation of a Nordic zone, it was suspicious of Kekkonen’s proposal. Though Finns were more eager to join NATO than Swedes in 2022, during the Cold War Finland was in a delicate position and more likely to consider Moscow’s views than its Scandinavian neighbors were, due to its proximity to the Soviet Union. Initially, Sweden saw Kekkonen’s effort as a Soviet initiative, much to the surprise of Finnish civil servants. Swedish suspicions were not wholly unfounded; a year earlier, the Soviet ambassador to Finland visited the Finnish president’s residence and recommended such an undertaking. Though Sweden was not actively pursuing nuclear weapons, its leadership wished to preserve the freedom to acquire them later.

By the late 1970s, Swedish disarmament efforts became more wide-ranging. In November 1978, Swedish Foreign Minister (and future UN weapons inspector as well as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency) Hans Blix aimed to widen the scope of the proposed NWFZ by including the Baltic Sea. In January 1983, the Swedish government even went so far as to propose that the zone also include the border between the Western and socialist states, extending 150 kilometers on each side of the border.

While the suggestion of incorporating the Baltic Sea was rejected at the time, the Soviets accepted the idea of a buffer zone and even suggested that it be wider, in the range of 250 to 300 kilometers on each side. In the United States, however, the idea went nowhere. Joseph Nye, who served as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science, and Technology from 1977 to 1979, later noted that there wasn’t much discussion of a Nordic nuclear weapon-free zone. Fast forward a few decades, and the proposal is now beyond dead.

While Sweden had been supportive of a NWFZ in general, its support was inconsistent, especially in the 1980s. For example, in June 1983, Prime Minister Olof Palme told the North Atlantic Assembly that adjacent areas (such as the Baltic Sea) should be included, but by December of that year, in a speech in Finland, Palme failed to mention that as a requirement. Similarly, in November 1983, Swedish Foreign Minister Lennart Bodström said that a zone could be created through a joint declaration by four Nordic countries accompanied by a pledge from outside powers not to use nuclear weapons against the Nordic states, only to revise this in December by requiring the denuclearization of the Baltic region as well. Support for a NWFZ was partially informed by extra-Nordic conduct, such as the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the United Kingdom and West Germany in 1983.

The Soviet perspective. Though Swedish military concerns during the Cold War, such as the initial call for nuclear weapons, were primarily shaped by the potential threat from the East, advocacy for nuclear disarmament contributed to what can be described as a generally friendly relationship between Stockholm and Moscow, especially when compared with contemporary East-West ties.

The prospect for nuclear disarmament in Sweden’s adjacent areas improved throughout the 1980s, with the United States and the Soviet Union negotiating and ultimately signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Whereas Moscow had previously rejected the proposal for the creation of a Baltic Sea NWFZ, it reversed itself by 1990. Early that year, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze sent a letter to his Swedish counterpart, Sten Andersson, calling for the establishment of a nuclear weapon-free Baltic Sea. In his letter Shevardnadze expressed his belief that “an agreement on this issue would be able to be worked out at a conference between diplomatic and military experts from the aforementioned states.”

The failure to establish such a NWFZ in the Baltic Sea region was likely outside Sweden’s control. According to Thomas Graham Jr., a senior diplomat who was part of the American delegation in every major nonproliferation and international arms control negotiation between 1970 and 1997, “America never thought it was very likely such a [Nordic Nuclear Weapon-Free] Zone would be negotiated,” which would have been a practical precondition before the establishment of a Baltic Sea NWFZ. Graham identified Norway as a hindrance, arguing that “[t]hough Norway is nuclear weapon-free it would not go against NATO on this.”

In the 2020s, however, it is Sweden and Finland that have arguably become the biggest advocates of US nuclear weapons.

Swedish marginalization. The middle of the Cold War was arguably the period during which Sweden had its most prominent role in advancing international nuclear arms control. However, by the 1980s the country was increasingly marginalized when it came to the reduction of global nuclear stockpiles. This was not a product of Sweden’s own doing but was due to the emergence of increasingly successful US-Soviet negotiations and treaties. The bilateral nature of the relationship between the two superpowers had the unintended effect of minimizing any potential influence that the Swedes could have.

According to Graham, “in the SALT/START negotiations on strategic arms between the United States and the Soviet Union, Sweden was simply not relevant.” The cause for this was the very factor that sparked Sweden’s interest in nuclear disarmament in the first place, namely its neutrality. “It was not a party to the negotiations nor an ally of one of the negotiating parties.”

This marginalization stands in contrast to international conferences within the framework of the United Nations, where American diplomats viewed Sweden as a disarmament activist state. Therefore, it is not surprising that Swedish officials made common cause with the Non-Aligned Movement of developing countries that existed outside the US-Soviet rivalry, despite not being a formal member of the organization. Swedish relevance depended on its ability to exert influence over other non-nuclear states, even after the Cold War ended.

The multilateral nature of the UN Conference of the Committee on Disarmament enhanced Swedish relevance. One way Sweden exerted its influence was by advocating for procedural reforms to improve the Conference’s effectiveness. Calls for the abolition of the co-chairmanship governing the Conference effectively aligned Sweden with countries such as Yugoslavia, Mexico, and Romania. Lennart Eckerberg, who led Sweden’s disarmament delegation in Geneva, remarked that “[t]he Swedish delegation, for one, favors several such [procedural] changes” and that this “is, of course, not primarily a procedural question but a political one.”

Swedish marginalization was not exclusively a result of the Soviet-American talks but also of the two Cold War camps. This was true of NATO more so than the Warsaw Pact, with the latter tending to be more supportive of Swedish disarmament efforts. Just a few months before the signing of SALT I, Eckerberg expressed his lack of hope that NATO members would push for a nuclear test ban ahead of a scheduled visit by the Swedish foreign minister to Moscow. In contrast to Western states, Eastern bloc states tended to sympathize with the Swedish position.

Fluctuating influence. Due to its small size, Sweden struggled to stay relevant. It did not have the diplomatic assets or clout that larger countries, especially the two superpowers, possessed. In a report to the foreign ministry, Swedish diplomat Gustaf Hamilton noted in a 1976 report while serving in Geneva as part of the delegation to the Conference on Disarmament: “A weakness in Sweden’s conduct is that we do not have sufficient personnel resources to produce working papers and proposals and don’t always have time in advance to ensure support for us among interested delegations. We lack, in other words, the capacity to plan long-term due to the personnel situation.”

This concern was ever-present throughout the Cold War, with Swedish officials forced to balance resources in a manner that optimized both Swedish contribution and overall effectiveness. This explains, in part, why there was a consistent preference for multilateral approaches, as opposed to lobbying individual countries in purely bilateral ways. It also explains Sweden’s focus on approaches such as the development of seismological counterproliferation technology.

As a frontier state between East and West, Sweden was able to use its geopolitical relevance to promote not only disarmament but also a broader program of tension reduction. But with Sweden now formally a member of NATO, the political will to play a role similar to the one Sweden played in the Cold War is largely absent and hard to muster in the absence of formal neutrality. Nevertheless, the country’s history suggests that ideas like nuclear weapon-free zones, which today are impossible to imagine in Europe, were once salient.