Sweden has quietly stepped into one of the most sensitive debates in global politics by opening preliminary talks with France and the United Kingdom on nuclear weapons cooperation.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson confirmed that Stockholm is now part of “active discussions” with the two European nuclear powers on how deterrence in Europe should look if United States guarantees weaken.
On paper, these talks are still exploratory. There are no public timelines, no formal proposals and no decision to host nuclear weapons on Swedish soil in peacetime. Even so, for a country that scrapped its secret bomb program in the early 1970s and helped build the global non-proliferation regime, this is a major turn in direction.
From non-nuclear champion to nuclear conversations
For decades, Sweden relied on the NATO nuclear umbrella from afar and invested heavily in diplomacy, peacekeeping and green technology instead of warheads. That posture shifted after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Sweden’s formal entry into NATO in 2024.
The tone hardened further this winter. A widely-discussed editorial in Dagens Nyheter argued that Europe can no longer avoid a serious debate about “Swedish nuclear weapons” and a European deterrent that does not depend entirely on Washington.
Kristersson then told Sweden’s public broadcaster that when Paris raises nuclear cooperation, Stockholm now answers that, as a NATO member, it wants to be fully involved in those discussions.
The background is simple, although not very comforting. The United States has signaled that Europe must take over most conventional defense tasks by 2027, while President Donald Trump questions the value of NATO and even flirts with choosing Greenland over the alliance.
In a separate interview he said that the main limit on his power is “my own morality, my own mind” and brushed aside international law. For many Europeans, that combination of nuclear control and personal improvisation feels like standing under a storm cloud with no umbrella.
A European bomb in a warming world
Into that storm steps a new European nuclear layer. France and the United Kingdom already deepened their own cooperation through the 2025 Northwood Declaration, which commits them to coordinate their independent deterrents and created a joint nuclear steering group.
Sweden’s conversations plug into this evolving framework, even if no one is yet talking publicly about shared control of warheads or joint arsenals.
So what does any of this have to do with ecology, climate or everyday life beyond the headlines? Quite a lot. Nuclear weapons are not just abstract symbols of power.
Historic testing has left radioactive contamination in soil, water and oceans from the Pacific atolls to Central Asia, with long-lived isotopes like plutonium and cesium still detectable in sediments and groundwater. Those materials can move through food chains and linger for generations.
Modern arsenals are not routinely tested in the open air anymore, yet the environmental risk does not disappear. Research on nuclear winter suggests that even a “limited” war using around one hundred Hiroshima sized weapons could loft billions of kilograms of soot into the upper atmosphere, cool the planet and disrupt rainfall patterns worldwide.
Cooling might sound tempting in a summer of heatwaves and droughts, but scientists stress that it would not reverse global warming. It would sit on top of it, smashing harvests, damaging the ozone layer and putting both terrestrial and marine ecosystems under immense stress.
Budgets, emissions and the green transition
There is another problem that shows up not in the sky, but in state budgets and in the atmosphere above Europe. According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, global nuclear weapons spending jumped to roughly 100.2 billion dollars in 2024, an eleven percent increase in a single year and equivalent to many times the annual United Nations budget.
Independent analysis notes that these sums could instead fund large-scale ecosystem restoration or clean energy rollouts that would help families with their electric bills and strengthen climate resilience.
Military rearmament itself also carries a carbon price tag. A recent study warned that planned NATO buildup could add up to 200 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year, roughly the annual footprint of a country the size of Pakistan.
Tanks, jets and new bases do not only burn fuel. They lock in long-term industrial production and land use, at the same time that governments tell citizens to insulate their homes, ditch diesel cars and eat less meat for the sake of the climate.
In practical terms, every krona or euro diverted into new nuclear related infrastructure is money that cannot go into renewable power, public transit or adaptation to floods and heat waves. For the most part, those opportunity costs land on the same taxpayers who already feel squeezed by rising food prices and higher mortgage rates.
Security, climate and what comes next
Supporters of a stronger European nuclear role argue that, as long as Russia and other states keep their arsenals, democracies need their own credible deterrent.
Kristersson has echoed that logic in Swedish media, stating that “as long as dangerous countries possess nuclear weapons, sound democracies must also have access to nuclear weapons”. From a narrow security angle, that position fits the current mood of fear.
Yet ecologists, health experts and disarmament advocates point to a different kind of security. They warn that any step which normalizes nuclear weapons, expands their role or encourages new states to edge closer to the bomb adds to the risk of accidents, miscalculation or escalation in a climate-stressed world.
A single serious incident would not only be a diplomatic catastrophe. It would be an environmental one, with consequences measured in centuries.
Kristersson himself has acknowledged that Europe faces “great geopolitical shifts” and that the transatlantic relationship has suffered, calling for Europeans to do more for their own defense while still valuing the alliance with the United States.
The open question is whether that extra effort will be shaped in a way that also protects the climate, biodiversity and public health, or whether nuclear hardware will quietly absorb resources that green policies desperately need.
For people far from Stockholm, Paris or London, this debate can sound distant. Yet it reaches into very concrete things such as how fast wind and solar projects get built, how much is available for insulating old apartment blocks against winter cold, or how crowded city trains feel if countries decide to slow investment in cleaner transport.
At the end of the day, European leaders are trying to navigate between immediate fear of war and the slower emergencies of climate disruption and pollution. How they balance those pressures will help decide whether the continent becomes safer in a broad, human sense or only in a narrow military one.
The official statement was published on government.se.
