Sweden’s prime minister said today that the presence of French nuclear weapons on his country’s soil, as a deterrent, is contrary to the Stockholm military doctrine, but that a war could change that attitude.
Asked today about the possibility of French nuclear weapons being deployed in Sweden, Prime Minister Ulf Kristerson told reporters: “We have a clear military doctrine” based on which “we do not have a permanent presence of foreign forces on Swedish soil, in peacetime.”
According to Christerson “this doctrine is valid” and therefore the deployment of French nuclear weapons in Sweden “is not an option”.
But in the case of “a war that, in one way or another, would affect us, then the situation would be completely different”, he added during his visit to Malmö, where the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle is docked.
Sweden ended two centuries of military neutrality and joined NATO in March 2024, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The US and Russia have thousands of nuclear warheads, but in Europe only France and Britain are nuclear powers. Together, the two countries have a few hundred nuclear warheads.
Faced with uncertainty over the military support the US would offer in Europe, European leaders began to consider ways to fill the void of a credible deterrent on the continent.
Reiterating that Swedish military doctrine does not allow the deployment of foreign troops on the country’s soil, Christerson commented that “since Russia has nuclear weapons in our neighborhood, it is good that two European republics (including France and Britain) also have nuclear weapons.”
