“no one is seriously contemplating messing with that either.”
- It would take Sweden, the leading and most technologically nation of Scandinavia (if not of the world by per capita terms) - a sparsely populated corner of the Europe all the same boasting 125% of Russia’s GDP! - about one mont to become a nuclear power.
Already in the 1950’s Sweden had the ability of producing it’s own nuclear weapons, but we refrained from doing so.
The great thing about nuclear weapons is that they guarantee peace while sparing mankind from the horror of nuclear warfare.
I’m not wishing to disrespect anyone here but nuclear powers have actually been defeated by non-nuclear powers in war throughout history.
There are three such examples; the US (Vietnam), France (Algeria) and the Soviet Union (Afghanistan).
No sovereign nation has attacked the soil of a nuclear power, ever in history.
It would take a lot longer than one month for Sweden to become a nuclear power of any kind, years to be a creditable one. (Every country, like Iran, that has gone nuclear, has started off by gaseous diffusion. The process requires tens of thousands of centrifuges to produce a few weapons per year. The U.S. declassified the process in the 1950’s because they did not believe that anyone one would ever take that approach again. India, Pakistan, Israel, Iraq and Iran proved otherwise. How Sweden would go, I do not know.)
Sweden’s decision to refrain from going nuclear was a calculation, like refraining from joining NATO. In the event of a general war in Europe, neither calculation is going to spare Sweden.
Recently disclosed Soviet plans for a limited war in Europe show they assumed that virtually every country in Europe without nuclear weapons, including Sweden and Finland, (as well as Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.) would be the target of numerous nuclear attacks. (I believe Switzerland was spared...)
Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France, of course, were spared.