We just had the leader of a Swedish party saying that non-US nuclear armament plans are needed, this is very significant since it's been basically unthinkable to say as far back as the 1960s or so when our own nuclear program was dismantled (The program was discontinued partly due to internal pressures but also rumored longstanding US guarantees for being under a nuclear shield).
I'd openly appreciate Sweden doing a nuclear test, preferably with almost plausible deniability (like Israel).
I'd also count support for this from any of our politicians as a plus for any party in our election this fall.
We have lots of money, the Swedes has nuclear power, know how, industrial expertise and probably a few guys left that still remember last time (they could have done it a number of times) they covertly almost built a nuke.
Hey look, a NATO founding member with a backbone, congratulations!
> After yesterday's events in the White House, Haltbakk Bunkers, one of Norway's largest marine fuel companies, appears to have announced that it will no longer refuel American Navy vessels
France and the UK are the obvious candidates, as both are nuclear powers.
Ideally there would be some coordination at the EU level, but really hard to see that short term.
It is not a new idea, but France would love to have others pay for their nuclear weapons, without giving up control. So yes, it will be a while to sort this out, but the box is open now. It is clear that own nukes are the only thing, the big powers respect. So many countries will pursue them now.
And building a simple nuke is not that complicated - when you have the nuclear material. Europe does.
It's not all "very likely" the next president of France would be far right.
The 2024 French legislative (not Presidential) snap election was Macron calling the electorate's bluff that even though they disliked low growth, carbon taxes, inflation, unemployment, immigration, they still wouldn't vote for a FN govt (in the second round; view the first round as a protest vote where some voters for FN are tactically expressing discontent with the govt).
The 2027 French presidential election is a long way away yet and Polymarket doesn't even have a prediction market open for it yet, but Oddschecker puts Le Pen as frontrunner but not "very likely"; and that's before Bayrou emerges as Macron's successor [0]. Macron stands to gain a lot of influence in Europe if he can forge a good relationship with Germany's Merz.
Anyway, obviously a European nuclear deterrent would have to firewall against any of the large member-states or their leaders going rogue. Rutte and NATO haven't commented publicly yet on Trump's recent stance. See what happens at the next G7 summit in Canada, 6/2025. And of course the Ukraine settlement and who provides security guarantees for it.
Evangelical American Zionism hates Jewish people with a thin facade of support. A disturbingly large amount of Americans believe that it's prophecy and God's will that the Middle East be "cleansed in fire" and that Israel's role as the Jewish state is an essential part of the plan. It is the same support a farmer offers to pigs when they fill their trough with slop. They want Israel so they can see its destruction through nuclear war.
It is a disgusting viewpoint and essential to understanding American Zionist support of Israel. My (lifelong far-right conservative jack-Mormon) father shared this with me 25 years ago.
Trident, the United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons program is dependent on Washington for the maintenance, design, and testing of UK submarines. The nuclear missiles aboard them are on lease from Uncle Sam.
If France can keep Sweden from resuming their own nuclear weapons program, they don't have to worry about getting into a nuclear war with Sweden 40 years from now. (Unthinkable? So was Sweden joining a mutual defense alliance like NATO.)
Drones make nukes obsolete anyway. After you nuke a country its generals no longer have any incentive to surrender; they have nothing to go home to when they leave their bunkers.
There's a significant difference between Fat Man (21 kilotonnes TNT yield) and Little Boy (15 kT) and 400 Minuteman IIIs each carrying a W87 (300 kilotonnes each, 120 000 kilotonnes total). And that's one third of the US's current nuclear triad. The second leg is 14 submarines, each carrying 20 Trident II missiles, each armed with an average of four warheads in MIRVs, for a total of some 1100 deployed independently retargetable warheads, which can be 475-kilotonne W88 warheads or something smaller. I'd look up the gravity-bomb numbers, but I think I've had enough already.
The effects on a country of 1000 or 2000 radioactive mushroom clouds seem like they'd be quite a bit larger than the one or two we've seen previously. You could see a billion people dead within an hour.
But they're very unselective weapons. The reason for the trend toward these sub-megatonne warheads is that it makes them more selective so they have more strategic value. But they really can't compete with simple precision weapons there. The US's force of 2800-some warheads costs about US$60 billion per year to maintain, about 20 million dollars per year per warhead. US$200 million will buy you 200 000 commercial drones with which you can kill almost 200 000 individually selected people with grenades. That's enormously more strategically valuable than the million random people you can kill with the warhead.
You need people to arm and deploy 200k drones. With nukes you just press a button. They're also a lot cheaper if you skimp on maintenance and make up for it in quantity.
What? Nobody has been nuked since the first atomic bombs in Japan, and those were devastating, convincing them to fully surrender. A lot more powerful and effective ones have been developed during the cold war. A couple megatons dropped on a major city could cause a massive firestorm. EMPs could be generated high up in the atmosphere knocking out the grid and unshielded electronics.
Also, Thomas Nilsson, head of Sweden’s military intelligence service (MUST), said that Sweden must be ready for any eventuality [with Russia from the Finnish border to the Arctic] after a Ukraine settlement.
