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They Sank A US Carrier. Now They Want NUKES
They Sank A US Carrier. Now They Want NUKES
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0:00
In a Stockholm conference room, Swedish defense officials gather around a
0:03
television. The President of the United States is speaking - calmly, confidently.
0:07
Then he says something that makes the room go quiet.
0:11
“I don't need international law…My morality. Myself. That's the only thing that can stop me.”
0:16
Someone mutters in Swedish. Another official leans back in their chair, rubbing their temples.
0:21
For 70 years, Sweden’s security rested on one assumption: America guarantees European peace.
0:26
The steady hand over the red button. That assumption just shattered.
0:30
Because the U.S. nuclear umbrella only works if America actually plans to use it.
0:35
Within weeks, Sweden’s most prestigious newspaper published something unthinkable:
0:39
an editorial calling for Sweden to seriously discuss nuclear weapons.
0:42
They weren’t asking France to extend its umbrella. They weren’t waiting for things to ‘calm down.’
0:47
They were talking about Sweden itself… building the bomb.
0:51
This is a country that gave the world diplomatic neutrality. A country so
0:55
committed to peace that it stayed out of both World Wars and the Cold War.
0:59
So what changed? How would they even do it? In 2024, after decades of staying neutral,
1:04
Sweden joined NATO. It was supposed to be the ultimate security upgrade.
1:08
Article 5 meant one thing: if Sweden is attacked, America is in the fight.
1:13
The problem of vulnerability looked to be solved, right? Well, not exactly.
1:16
Because treaties don’t defend you. Decisions do. And decisions can change overnight.
1:21
Back in 2017, European leaders worried the U.S.
1:24
might simply walk away from NATO - scary, but at least predictable.
1:28
But today, the situation is far more complicated.
1:31
America isn’t just turning its back on the alliance these days, but is using it as leverage.
1:36
In January 2026, fresh from toppling the Maduro regime in Venezuela, America turned
1:41
its gaze toward Greenland, issuing a series of public threats that would’ve seemed absurd
1:45
just a few years earlier. When Denmark, which has governed Greenland for centuries, refused to even
1:50
discuss selling it, Washington didn’t back down. Instead, when Nordic countries, including Sweden,
1:55
sent troops to Greenland for joint military exercises in solidarity with Denmark, the White
2:00
House hit them with 10% tariffs. The message was blunt - give us what we want, or pay the price.
2:06
And that was the moment Nordic leaders started thinking the unthinkable:
2:09
what if the alliance itself could turn into a pressure weapon?
2:12
For the first time in its history, Danish intelligence officially listed the United
2:16
States as a strategic threat. They put America on the same list as Russia and
2:20
China. Denmark has been a staunch U.S. ally since World War II. They fought in Afghanistan
2:25
and Iraq. And now their intelligence service is warning about the threat from Washington.
2:30
The Danish Prime Minister didn't mince her words either. She stated publicly that an attack on
2:34
Greenland would end NATO. Not weaken it. End it. That wasn’t just drama. That was a warning. The
2:41
NATO structure could break faster than Europe could replace it.
2:44
Then came the timeline that changed everything.
2:46
In December 2025, Pentagon officials quietly informed European diplomats that they had
2:52
one year to take over responsibility for defending their own continent.
2:55
One year isn’t a plan. It’s a countdown. When European leaders war-gamed this exact
3:00
scenario the previous spring, they'd estimated they needed five to ten years to build up
3:04
sufficient capability. So Europe didn’t lose
3:07
a few years. It lost the future. Sweden joined NATO thinking it had
3:11
found a safety net. Instead, it found itself in an alliance where the strongest member increasingly
3:16
views allies less as partners and more as pieces on a chessboard. As it turns out, the nuclear
3:21
umbrella Sweden thought would protect it only works if someone's willing to hold them over you.
3:26
But Sweden isn’t new to this. Not even close. From 1945 to 1972 - while the world saw
3:32
Sweden as the poster child for neutrality - Swedish scientists
3:35
were quietly working on nuclear weapons. By the late 1950s, Sweden was quietly building
3:40
the foundations of a nuclear weapons program. Scientists had solved most of the theoretical
3:44
problems, detailed bomb designs were on paper, and reactors capable of producing plutonium were
3:50
coming online. Declassified documents ultimately revealed just how far the program had gone. By
3:55
the mid-1960s, Sweden was no longer asking if it could build a bomb, but whether it should.
4:00
With sustained political will, a Swedish nuclear weapon was a realistic late-1960s possibility.
4:06
While Sweden's diplomats were championing nuclear disarmament at the United Nations,
4:10
Swedish engineers were months from joining the nuclear club.
4:14
So why did they want nukes? The short of it is that Sweden was trapped. Official
4:18
neutrality meant they couldn't count on NATO protection, but they lived right
4:22
next door to the Soviet Union - one of two superpowers with enough Iskander missiles
4:27
crammed into the Kaliningrad enclave to crater Stockholm and enough nuclear weapons to end
4:32
civilization. Sweden's geographic position was precarious, and they needed insurance.
4:37
The nuclear program was that insurance policy. Never publicly acknowledged,
4:41
and certainly never deployed, but almost real all the same.
4:45
In 1966, Sweden's government made the decision to abandon the program.
4:49
They signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, in 1968, officially committing to never develop
4:55
nuclear weapons. The program wound down over the next few years and finally ended in 1972.
5:00
Yet that technical expertise didn’t simply vanish overnight. Sweden still operates 6
5:05
nuclear power plants to this day - producing about a third of the
5:08
country’s power. They've maintained deep institutional knowledge of nuclear physics,
5:12
a grasp on reactor technology, and the handling of radioactive materials.
5:17
That's decades of continuous experience with nuclear technology - just the civilian kind.
5:22
Then there are the submarines. Sweden's Gotland-class submarines are famous in
5:27
defense circles for being absurdly quiet. How quiet? In 2005, the Swedish navy
5:32
“sank” the USS Ronald Reagan in war games. And not just once; multiple times. For the
5:38
price of two F-18 Super Hornets, the Swedes sank a supercarrier 60 times its price.
5:43
The billion-dollar aircraft carrier never even knew the Swedish sub was there.
5:47
The U.S. Navy was so impressed—and undeniably concerned—that they actually leased one of
5:53
Sweden's submarines for 2 years just to train their fleet against it. American
5:56
naval officers needed to learn how to fight against something they couldn't detect.
6:00
Now, you might be wondering what super-quiet submarines have to do
6:04
with nuclear weapons. Everything, actually. Because nuclear deterrence isn’t just about
6:08
building a bomb. It’s about proving you can still strike back after you’ve been hit.
6:12
The hard part is building a credible second-strike capability - meaning that even if an enemy wipes
6:18
out your cities in a surprise first strike, you still have enough firepower left to retaliate.
6:23
That’s what stops the attack from ever happening in the first place.
6:26
And so it logically follows that the absolute best place to hide
6:29
nuclear weapons is where they can't be destroyed in a first
6:32
strike. Which puts submarines that nobody can find high up on the list.
6:36
Sweden abandoned their nuclear weapons program decades ago. But they kept building the delivery
6:41
system. They kept perfecting the technology that makes nuclear deterrence actually work.
6:46
So when people talk about Sweden having a "leftover Cold War era nuclear weapons
6:50
project," they're not being entirely metaphorical. Institutional knowledge
6:54
exists. The submarine technology exists. Nuclear expertise exists.
6:58
The question now isn't whether Sweden could theoretically build nuclear weapons. It's
7:02
whether they will, and whether they can do it fast enough to matter.
7:06
Sweden isn't panicking in isolation. All across Europe,
7:09
countries are scrambling to figure out what comes next.
7:11
France and Britain, Europe's only nuclear powers, signed something called the Northwood
7:15
Declaration in July 2025. For the first time, they're coordinating their nuclear operations
7:20
through a joint steering group. They're not sharing the launch codes or anything
7:24
that dramatic, but they are working together strategically in ways they never have before.
7:29
French President Emmanuel Macron proposed extending France's nuclear
7:32
umbrella to protect other European nations. On paper, this sounds perfect. In practice,
7:37
French politicians from both the far-left and far-right immediately attacked him for it,
7:41
calling it a betrayal of French sovereignty.
7:43
At the NATO Summit in The Hague in June 2025, member states made a jaw-dropping commitment:
7:49
they pledged to spend 5% of GDP on defense by 2035. For context,
7:54
the current target is 2%, and about half of NATO members barely exceed
7:58
that. We're talking about more than doubling defense spending across an entire continent.
8:03
Germany announced it would increase its defense budget from €86 billion today to €153 billion
8:09
by 2029. According to strategic analysts, that projected increase alone would exceed
8:14
the combined 2024 defense spending of the Eastern European NATO countries known as the
8:19
Bucharest Nine. Germany is essentially building a military budget the size of a small continent.
8:25
But there's a problem. Spain's Prime Minister Pedro
8:28
Sánchez rejected the 5% target entirely, arguing that it would be “counterproductive” and harm the
8:34
Spanish economy. It was a slap in the face to the rest of NATO. If countries start picking
8:38
and choosing which threats they care about, collective defense falls apart pretty quickly.
8:43
Poland has been the most aggressive about all this. Prime Minister Donald
8:46
Tusk announced Poland is seriously discussing joining France's nuclear
8:50
umbrella. President Andrzej Duda called for the U.S. to deploy nuclear weapons on Polish
8:54
soil - the same arrangement Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey currently have.
9:00
Then in May 2025, reports emerged that Tusk stated Poland would look to develop
9:04
its own nuclear warheads to make Eastern Europe “safe” and “invincible.” If true,
9:10
that would be a clear violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty Poland
9:13
signed. But when Russia is your neighbor and your traditional protector seems
9:17
increasingly unreliable, international treaties start feeling less binding.
9:21
Making everything more complicated, Europe can't maintain unity.
9:25
Hungary's Viktor Orbán constantly undermines collective decisions. Different countries have
9:30
wildly different threat perceptions and budget constraints. Far-right parties are
9:34
rising across the continent, and many of them oppose deeper European military integration.
9:39
This is where Sweden's proposal gets clever. The newspaper editorial does more than merely
9:43
advocate for Swedish nuclear weapons. It proposes shared Nordic nuclear weapons,
9:48
possibly including Germany in the arrangement.
9:50
Is the logic here sound? If every European country that feels threatened starts building its own
9:56
nuclear arsenal, you get massive proliferation. Poland gets nukes. Then the Baltic states feel
10:01
they need them. Maybe Romania and Bulgaria decide they can't be left out. Before long,
10:06
you've got a dozen new nuclear powers, each with their own command structures,
10:09
security protocols, and potential for accidents or miscalculation.
10:13
But what if regional groups pooled their resources instead? A Nordic nuclear deterrent covering
10:19
Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark - possibly with Germany joining - would provide credible
10:24
regional security while keeping the total number of nuclear powers relatively small.
10:28
As the editorial argues: "An obvious risk of [Washington's] policies is
10:32
widespread nuclear proliferation. No one wants a situation where many
10:36
countries feel compelled to acquire their own weapons. But shared Nordic
10:40
nuclear weapons - perhaps together with Germany - could counteract exactly that."
10:44
It's a compromise between dangerous proliferation and dangerous dependence.
10:48
Instead of 10 new nuclear powers, you get one new regional arrangement.
10:53
And that raises one last question.
10:55
If Sweden can’t build nukes fast enough… why are they even talking about it?
10:59
The brutal reality is that enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels requires specialized
11:04
facilities Sweden doesn’t currently have. Building them would take years,
11:08
cost billions, and be impossible to hide from satellites and international inspectors.
11:12
The world would know immediately.
11:15
Then there are the legal consequences. Sweden signed the Non-Proliferation
11:18
Treaty. Withdrawing would trigger international sanctions, economic isolation, and diplomatic
11:23
condemnation. Worse, it would undermine the exact thing Sweden claims to want to prevent.
11:28
If Sweden tears up the rulebook, so does everyone else.
11:31
The timeline is equally problematic. Most experts estimate that even with Sweden's
11:35
nuclear expertise, developing a functional weapon would’ve taken years, not months. Detailed
11:40
technical studies of Sweden’s own plans estimated an 8–10-year development period if the equipment
11:45
was already in place. Contemporary U.S. analysts in the 1960s likewise judged that such countries
11:51
would need up to a decade to field a nuclear weapons capability if unrestrained by treaty.
11:56
And the timeline is the killer. Even with Sweden’s expertise,
12:00
this is a years-long project - not a months-long emergency fix.
12:04
Then there's the money. France and Britain spend
12:07
billions annually just maintaining their relatively small arsenals. For Sweden,
12:10
a country of 10 million people, the economic burden would be staggering-
12:14
especially while simultaneously trying to hit that 5% defense spending target.
12:19
The political obstacles might be the tallest of all. While some politicians have expressed
12:23
interest, most of Sweden's establishment opposes nuclear weapons. Public opinion
12:27
is deeply divided. The idea clashes fundamentally with Sweden's self-image.
12:32
The shared Nordic option faces even steeper challenges. You'd need unanimous agreement
12:37
from multiple sovereign governments on who controls the weapons, when they can be used,
12:41
and how decisions get made. Getting Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and possibly Germany to
12:46
agree on nuclear strategy is diplomatic complexity that makes Brexit negotiations look simple.
12:52
The harsh reality? Sweden probably can't acquire nuclear weapons quickly enough to
12:56
address the current security crisis even if it wanted to.
12:59
But maybe that’s not really the point?
13:02
Back to that conference room in Stockholm. Those officials aren't sitting there because
13:05
they think Sweden will have nuclear weapons by next year. They're sitting there because
13:09
their entire understanding of how the world works just got turned upside down.
13:13
For 75 years, the transatlantic alliance defined European security. America provided
13:18
the nuclear umbrella, the overwhelming military force, the guarantee that let
13:22
Europe focus on prosperity instead of defense. It was the deal that rebuilt
13:27
Europe after World War II, and now it looks to be breaking down in real time.
13:31
When a national newspaper publishes an editorial about nuclear weapons,
13:35
they’re really forcing a conversation Sweden never thought it would need to
13:38
have again. The editorial is essentially saying the country can't pretend anymore.
13:42
It needs to talk about things they desperately don't want to talk about.
13:46
Europe is being forced to fundamentally reimagine
13:48
its security. The continent needs to build serious military capability and
13:52
take responsibility for its own defense in ways it hasn't had to since 1945.
13:57
That Sweden is talking about nuclear weapons tells you everything about how dramatically
14:02
the security landscape has shifted. The nuclear genie isn’t out of the
14:05
bottle yet. But Sweden is standing right there, hand hovering over the cork… because
14:10
the old rules don’t feel real anymore. Now go check out This Will Happen If US
14:15
Pulls Out of NATO (Day by Day). Or click on this video instead.
They Sank A US Carrier. Now They Want NUKES - Video học tiếng Anh
