Imagine the Guardian newspaper fully committing to increasing Britain’s stockpile of nuclear warheads. It may sound fanciful, but that’s the closest comparison to what happened last week, when the Swedish liberal–left leaning Dagens Nyheter wrote in a leading article:
‘We are going to need a [national] discussion about nuclear weapons. Should the French [nuclear forces] protect the entire continent, or do we need to acquire a nuclear deterrent of our own, perhaps in cooperation with our Nordic neighbours?’
The idea that Sweden – the self-described global apostle of nuclear disarmament – should produce nuclear weapons would have seemed ridiculous not long ago. In fact, when I argued in a column published in Sweden a few months ago that we should resurrect our 1960s nuclear weapons programme, it was considered almost too bizarre to contemplate.
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