Swedish nuclear weapons program
The Swedish nuclear weapons program was operated from 1945 to 1972 and was intended to serve the development of nuclear weapons .
After the end of World War II and the American atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki , the greatest military threat to neutral Sweden lay in the nuclear armament of the Soviet Union . Research on nuclear weapons, like research on protection against the nuclear threat, was carried out in the Defense Research Institute ( Försvarets forskningsanstalt , FOA for short).
The FOA presented the first serious plans to create a nuclear weapon in 1948. The project should run at the same time as a program for the civil use of nuclear energy and use the domestic uranium resources as nuclear fuel . The reactors in Ågesta and Marviken were supposed to produce weapons- grade plutonium and at the same time provide energy. The Saab 36 aircraft was planned for the use of nuclear weapons, and submarines and aircraft such as the Saab 32 Lansen and the Saab 37 Viggen should also be able to carry nuclear weapons.
All activities were carried out through the FOA. The plan was to produce 100 nuclear warheads over a period of ten years. During the 1960s it was still not clear whether Sweden would develop a nuclear capacity. In 1968 all plans for a Swedish nuclear weapons program were stopped when Sweden signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty . The final phase of the program ended in 1972 when the FOA ended its experiments with plutonium.
The civilian use of nuclear energy programs continued and by 2010 the country had ten active reactors.
Web links
- Defense Research Institute and Plans for Swedish Nuclear Weapons, March 2001 (Swedish; PDF; 4.4 MB)
- Sveriges Radio: Documentation - Swedish Nuclear Weapons Program (Swedish)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento from June 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive )