I don't think there's any question at this point that it's in Nordic self interest to develop a nuclear deterrent. This has also become true for other regions in the world.
This is all a horrible development for the overall future of humanity, but it's the world we live in now. At a minimum hundreds of billions of dollars will be siphoned off from more beneficial uses over the coming decades, and the risk of major accidents will increase. The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.
Almost all of the world's nukes are controlled by aging old dictators or aspiring dictators who are surrounded by sycophants and treat competence as much less important than personal loyalty. Geopolitical risks are only going to increase as these rulers become more erratic and demented.
> I don't think there's any question at this point that it's in Nordic self interest to develop a nuclear deterrent.
Yes, it definitely is.
> The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.
A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome.
That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.
> and the risk of major accidents will increase.
I don't think that's reasonable to say about a bunch of countries getting their first nuke.
The concern should be more with countries like the US and Russia that have so many nukes, which they can't possibly use effectively, and don't have the ability to properly maintain.
If every western country had exactly one nuke, the world would probably be much safer than if the US has all of them.
> A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome. That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.
It's even more complex than that. If Ukraine responded conventional war with nukes, it can be sure Russia would retaliate with even more nukes, practically extinguishing their statehood.
The equilibrium is reached when the exchange is equally devastating, so the only winning move is attacking first, and only if the attacked won't be able to retaliate. The Cold War never ended, just warmed a little, because it doesn't exist (yet) a guaranteed way to avoid an all-out nuclear retaliation.
In light of renewed aggressions from powerful states, the only recourse smaller states have to defend themselves is to turn themselves into a fortress like Taiwan (which is prohibitively expensive for most larger states) or nuclear deterrence (which Ukraine gave up for false guarantees of protection from invasion). Guarantees aren't what they used to be, and I wouldn't be surprised if many waning US allies are covertly developing nuclear capabilities.
I hope my state is because the alternative is being at the whim of the powerful nuclear states around us in a political climate of rising authoritarianism.
Ukraine was never a nuclear power any real sense. The USSR's bombs were parked there, and Ukraine merely had physical (but not operational) custody over them after the USSR fell. Ukraine could have kept them to bootstrap a nuclear arms program, but they didn't, so they were never had a nuclear deterrent to give up in the first place.
Nice russian talking point. UA designed developed and maintained most top tier soviet nuclear weapons. The largest nuke plant in USSR was Yuzhmash in Dnepr and largest design bureau again in UA Dnepr KB Yuzhnoe. UA had to help maintain russian nukes after the collapse of USSR cause russia lacked tech. capability.
Ukraine never had the possibility to keep its nuclear arsenal, they simply didn't have the infrastructure for it, let's not pretend they had any real choice.
North Korea has nukes but those in the Nordics are bragging about defeating Russia by buying heat pumps. Much of Europe has been living in a time of what amounts to ignorant bliss which Putin is slowly shaking them out of.
Germany hasn't invaded France (or vice versa) for two generations now. The Soviet Union dissolved itself peacefully by act of parliament. (Compare to Germany/Japan/Napoleon)
Is it time? Maybe. Will they do it? Probably not. The European countries constantly talk and never act. It took the second Russian invasion of Ukraine for them to even barely start to do anything and even now, they are still trying to get the US to continue to be the backbone of their defense strategy. Even as the US takes actions that (in their minds) are ruining that idea, instead of acting, they just complain and condemn.
Even if tomorrow they decided to actual work together and invest in their own capabilities it would be decades before they would be free of the US defense sector and they know it and it's why they are so resistant to the idea. I think you would need to see more aggression by the Russians combined with substantially more shenanigans by the US (more than just bombastic announcements for the sake of grabbing media attention) for that to change because you are talking about trillion dollar investment, every year, for decades to walk a different path.
I find it funny that everyone complains that Europeans currently just talk and never act.. Every time Europeans acted, it ended in either a world war, of half of the war colonized.. So not sure if you really want Europeans to act..
I'm not sure how we went from the "act" being "invest in their own defense" to "start ww3" but I am quite confident no one is complaining they are not doing that, lol.
From what I have understood, a significant part of the reason why Sweden scrapped its nuke program last time around, was that we found out that nukes pose more questions than they answer. Obviously, you need the nukes themselves, and a reliable delivery mechanism. Neither are cheap. Preferably, you want second-strike capability, which is kind of tricky. And you want some way of balancing things so that the enemy does not take a chance on that second-strike capability and nuke you first anyway. Then you need something to use them for. At the time, the targets would probably have been ports in the Baltic states, then (involuntary) parts of the Soviet union and likely starting points for the hypothetical Soviet invasion fleet. Could we really stomach the idea of killing a few thousand Estonian civilians, probably not too happy about being used as stepping stones by the Soviets? For most military targets, there are better weapons.
Of course, it has later been argued that by entering into various more or less hidden agreements with the US, we made ourselves nuclear targets anyway, with no formal guarantees whatsoever to show for it...
nuclear weapons are one of those insidious technologies that are almost self-replicating in a sense, because if your enemy has nukes it strongly behooves one to either also have nukes or to buddy up with someone who has them. Opting out entirely is very difficult once the genie is out of the bottle
I live in Norway and I agree we should have a nuclear deterrent, however this article feels like navel gazing, it’s long, projecting and speculative.
What is not discussed well is delivery systems, which we are lacking for second strike capability… submarines or complex siloes?
My only wish for the program is that we keep the capability within our control to prevent political overhead and give the current government the ability to destroy the current capabilities at a moment’s notice in case the following govt seems irresponsible. Who knows what we will look like in 200years.
Russia is genocidal, US unreliable and erratic. The civilized world needs nukes. Not only the Nordic countries, but also Germany and Poland. Unless Russia and US are willing to give up theirs ;)
Germany? Hell no. We need CE + Nordics to have a unified front and to keep West and East in check. Nordics + Poland + Czech Rep + Ronania and maybe a few smaller countries is the sweet spot.
This is what Trump's dismantling of US power has brought us to. Our soon-to-be-former allies can't count on US nuclear deterrence to protect them, because not only is the US unreliable, but they might be the ones attacking.
We're in crazy-town because of Trump and the Republicans, with very real consequences.
France kicked the US military out of France in 1966 and left NATO's military command structure.
They largely rejoined in 2009 (and very deliberately never rejoined NATO's Nuclear Planning Group), but if any NATO member is capable of going it alone on this one, it's probably France.
240 nukes on subs is plenty to wave around as a stick, too.
it's easy to lay the state of the US at the feet of the GOP, but Democratic leadership has been ineffectual for decades, either by continuing GOP policies ala Bill Clinton's continuing the Reaganite policy of deregulation into the 90s or Obama's continuing Dubya-era policies in the war on terror or in simply throwing up their hands in defeat ala the Biden DoJ completely dropping the ball wrt the Jan 6th and Trump investigations or Schumer today being damn-near worthless in offering even the appearance of resistance to the dismantling of the liberal democratic apparatus of the US government.
The Democratic Party is merely the other half within the narrow confines of allowed political discourse in the mainstream. I won't go so far as to say they're controlled opposition but it is very clear that they have had no intentions of upsetting the status quo for a very long time and it has lead to the what is currently happening today.
staymad, nerds; if you think Daddy Democrat is saving the day, you are in for a rude awakening
Delivery of nuclear weapon via shipping container might seem like a deterrent but it's kind of the opposite thing.
For something to be a deterrent it must have a few properties. Delivery taking a non-zero amount of time and producing a gigantic visible ordeal from outer space is a feature here. A container bomb going off somewhere in a civilian logistics chain is a surprise. Surprises cannot be deterrent by their very definition. The inability to ~instantly attribute the attack to some party would only invite additional instability.
Container ships tend to be fairly slow to respond and may not function as expected during a nuclear war.
The only way for this to work as a retaliatory measure is to have the weapons already in place at the target locations. Now, imagine if someone were to discover the weapon and trace it back to whomever installed it. This is effectively a slow motion nuclear exchange that was initiated by the "defender".
Also used to run a nuclear weapons program back in the day[1]. Though, to be honest, I think it'd be politically impossible to revive today. There's barely political will to build new nuclear power.
I do not think that nuclear power is viewed same as nuclear war heads. One is perceived as potentional ecological catasprophe and the second one as a weapon of retaliation.
I honestly don't think most people understand either. Younger generations are a bit more open minded, but for a lot of people who lived through the news reports of Cs137-fallout from Chernobyl raining down on them, nuclear anything is represents an invisible and scary boogyman.
At the fall of the USSR, CocaCola should have bartered soda with Russia for the nukes. After all, the Cola Wars were heating up even as the Cold War looked to be ending, and Pepsi had a superior navy, bartered from the USSR with soda, and Coke needed a nuclear deterent.
Have the CIA turn enough insiders that one of them succeeds in assassinating Putin after a propaganda campaign raising up an opposition party ready to take over in an election/coup (mixture of both really). Have a weak and friendly leader installed that exchanges nukes for population support and possibly brakes up Russia into several smaller states.
When the USSR broke up, Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for security guarantees (lot of good that has done them)
Tell me you honestly think what is happening in America right now isn't the outcome of long planning by Russian intelligence (and likely other intelligence services). Their plan was to install a leader they had chosen and influenced.
Also Epstein was probably also a spy, but more likely for Mossad. BIG COINCIDENCE he was so close with dear leader?
Then tell me you think that doing things in Russia isn't possible.
Ukraine gave up more than nukes, it forfeited future membership in russian federation and nato. All the ridiculous bush-era bluster about nato membership for ukraine was in itself a (minor) violation of budapest memo.
Reasonable observers don't think ukraine could have kept russia's nukes, firstly because they were russia's and not ukraine's, and secondly because a country with less than $100B economy (in shambles at the end of the ussr) can't afford to maintain nuclear surety. Additionally, it's very unclear whether any nukes would have been employed by now. Any nuclear attack on russia would result in total annihilation, and if ukraine could only strike a few high-value targets in exchange, it's not a winning weapon or even a deterrent.
Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.
How do envision we might disarm an adversary with thousands of nuclear missiles, other than by preemptively nuking them and hoping they don't respond in time. Not really a plausible plan.
Nordic countries have had nuclear power plants for half a century.
If they don't have a sufficient secret stock pile of nuclear weapons already, then they have been utter and total fools.
If they don't have secret nuclear weapons in orbit, they have been severely irresponsible.
Let's hope the plans of their leaders is not to send all young men as infantry to the meat grinder to die for a country which hates them, like they are doing in the Ukraine war. But who knows? Life is full of surprises.
to your point, historically mumps neutered some infected men. i don't know how one could calculate how much population was prevented by mumps before vaccines, though.
The Greenland affair has illuminated the US-Europe relationship. For whatever inequities may lie in asking / threatening to take this essentially worthless piece of land... I would have thought the value was less than a powerful ally.
The fact that Europe unified against the US, threatening to shoot first, proved they'd rather have an empty piece of ice / dirt, than our friendship and protection. It made me re-evaluate the whole Russia / Ukraine affair.
While Western Europe claimed to be mortal enemies with Russia... the US was providing much of the weapons. While the US was seizing Russian oil tankers, Europe was buying their gas. There's no dispute that the US is against Russia... and yet Europe would turn to fight the US too?
However, Europe doesn't view the US as an ally. Greenland is not enough to change their position, but it's enough to reveal their true position.
Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against. Both sides have the same goal. Russia is killing swaths of European men, and that's about it. Ukraine is killing swaths of European men. The territorial control doesn't explain the war. The killing is the purpose.
> Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against. Both sides have the same goal. Russia is killing swaths of European men, and that's about it. Ukraine is killing swaths of European men. The territorial control doesn't explain the war. The killing is the purpose.
By this logic Japan was aligned with USA during WW2, because both sides were killing people.
The logic remains sound, but the facts are different. There was real territorial gain / loss in the Pacific theater. Japan's imperial motives make sense, because they actually did conquer a lot of Asia / Pacific Islands. The US's defense / retaliation motives also make sense, because the US did re-take its territory and force a surrender. So, the proffered motives don't appear to be a pretext.
There's also an absence of an apparent ulterior motive. The US and Japan were also on opposite sides of the world, and had little to no prior history. It's not clear why (or along what lines) they would cooperate with each other in the presence of such real territorial conflict.
Germany is a somewhat closer case. Germany and the US had a shared history and tradition. Socialist / Communist politics were widespread in both, and the US was largely divided as to whether they would support or oppose the German socialists / war. So there is a much stronger case for an ulterior motive here. Indeed, Germany indisputably wanted many of their own people to be killed. Their leadership's desire to kill jewish German is beyond dispute... so as it relates to other classes of Germans (e.g. those who fill the Wiermact ranks)... I don't think we can rule out the possibility on the grounds that those people were (also) German.
However, to get back to the territorial aspect, Germany conquered a lot of land, and the Allies took it back. So, a closer situation to the current stalemate in Ukraine would be WWI. If they're not making any progress in terms of territory... what progress do they think they're making? The main change I see from here is that people are dying... so that's probably the whole point.
What are you on about. We had a great thing going until your (Assuming this is a US person speaking and not a Russian or other troll bot) president started breaking that relationship down. We never threatened to "shoot first" lol, we simply responded to the threat of having Greenland taken by force.
Our relationship has been deteriorating because it was very clear that the US was not behaving like the ally they said they were.
The US, under Trump, also bombed and sanctioned Iran, a major ally of Russia and supplier of drones and drone parts, and kidnapped Maduro, their staunchest ally in the Western Hemisphere, and tariffed countries buying Russian energy, and seized an actual Russian-flagged (not "shadow") tanker, despite it having a submarine escort--something Europe would never have the will to do.
> Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against
Also note the shift by Canada and Europe to trade more with China. Obviously some trade with China is unavoidable, but seeing them running into the arms of Beijing is quite unexpected, given that China is the single largest consumer of Russian energy exports, and in turn supplies Russia with various restricted, "dual use" components for their drone and other munitions programs, along with vital intelligence for launching strikes in Ukraine.
This article is so batty it's hard to take seriously. The Nordics are not going to be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. I know the UNSC seems toothless most of the time, but on this issue they are united.
This is all a horrible development for the overall future of humanity, but it's the world we live in now. At a minimum hundreds of billions of dollars will be siphoned off from more beneficial uses over the coming decades, and the risk of major accidents will increase. The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.
Almost all of the world's nukes are controlled by aging old dictators or aspiring dictators who are surrounded by sycophants and treat competence as much less important than personal loyalty. Geopolitical risks are only going to increase as these rulers become more erratic and demented.
Yes, it definitely is.
> The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.
A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome. That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.
> and the risk of major accidents will increase.
I don't think that's reasonable to say about a bunch of countries getting their first nuke. The concern should be more with countries like the US and Russia that have so many nukes, which they can't possibly use effectively, and don't have the ability to properly maintain.
If every western country had exactly one nuke, the world would probably be much safer than if the US has all of them.
It's even more complex than that. If Ukraine responded conventional war with nukes, it can be sure Russia would retaliate with even more nukes, practically extinguishing their statehood.
The equilibrium is reached when the exchange is equally devastating, so the only winning move is attacking first, and only if the attacked won't be able to retaliate. The Cold War never ended, just warmed a little, because it doesn't exist (yet) a guaranteed way to avoid an all-out nuclear retaliation.
I hope my state is because the alternative is being at the whim of the powerful nuclear states around us in a political climate of rising authoritarianism.
They couldn't have launched the Russian warheads as-is, but disassembly and reuse of the warhead material is another thing entirely.
insane we're back here.
Germany hasn't invaded France (or vice versa) for two generations now. The Soviet Union dissolved itself peacefully by act of parliament. (Compare to Germany/Japan/Napoleon)
Even if tomorrow they decided to actual work together and invest in their own capabilities it would be decades before they would be free of the US defense sector and they know it and it's why they are so resistant to the idea. I think you would need to see more aggression by the Russians combined with substantially more shenanigans by the US (more than just bombastic announcements for the sake of grabbing media attention) for that to change because you are talking about trillion dollar investment, every year, for decades to walk a different path.
Of course, it has later been argued that by entering into various more or less hidden agreements with the US, we made ourselves nuclear targets anyway, with no formal guarantees whatsoever to show for it...
What is not discussed well is delivery systems, which we are lacking for second strike capability… submarines or complex siloes?
My only wish for the program is that we keep the capability within our control to prevent political overhead and give the current government the ability to destroy the current capabilities at a moment’s notice in case the following govt seems irresponsible. Who knows what we will look like in 200years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsMcAvAITjk
Canada has all of the resources too; SK is the 2nd largest source of uranium in the world.
I think you’re missing a few other countries
Russia will be prepared to launch another attack in just a few years after the war on Ukraine ends and the US cannot be relied upon.
In fact, it's even worse as the US may end up as the enemy!
We're in crazy-town because of Trump and the Republicans, with very real consequences.
But the collapse of the EU/US relationship means you probably want to plan for the potential of a similar collapse within the European alliances.
Even if American defences stopped 80% of them, estimates say France has enough (290*(1-0.8)=58) to destroy every state capital.
Is more really necessary, if the goal is simply to deter?
They largely rejoined in 2009 (and very deliberately never rejoined NATO's Nuclear Planning Group), but if any NATO member is capable of going it alone on this one, it's probably France.
240 nukes on subs is plenty to wave around as a stick, too.
The Democratic Party is merely the other half within the narrow confines of allowed political discourse in the mainstream. I won't go so far as to say they're controlled opposition but it is very clear that they have had no intentions of upsetting the status quo for a very long time and it has lead to the what is currently happening today.
staymad, nerds; if you think Daddy Democrat is saving the day, you are in for a rude awakening
Rockets, submarines, aircraft, or even a nuke in a container ship parked in a big harbor work.
Reminds me of the Rapid Dragon missile system the US uses to weaponize cargo planes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system)
I'd fully expect China and the US to be working on such things.
For something to be a deterrent it must have a few properties. Delivery taking a non-zero amount of time and producing a gigantic visible ordeal from outer space is a feature here. A container bomb going off somewhere in a civilian logistics chain is a surprise. Surprises cannot be deterrent by their very definition. The inability to ~instantly attribute the attack to some party would only invite additional instability.
You don't have to have them on a container ship. You need the credible threat of being able to do so.
The only way for this to work as a retaliatory measure is to have the weapons already in place at the target locations. Now, imagine if someone were to discover the weapon and trace it back to whomever installed it. This is effectively a slow motion nuclear exchange that was initiated by the "defender".
"Yeah, you can drop bunker busters on the silos you know about, but six months later one of your cities evaporates."
The five big nuclear powers use subs for this, but it's hardly the only option.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_progra...
Any country (this includes both democracies and petty dictatorships) which wishes to be safe and independent must get nukes and means of delivery now.
Edit: to be more clear: I can't believe that after 4 fucking years, a hostile nation is still permitted to wage war against a sovereign country.
What exactly do you think their response to attempted forcible disarmament would be?
When the USSR broke up, Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for security guarantees (lot of good that has done them)
Also Epstein was probably also a spy, but more likely for Mossad. BIG COINCIDENCE he was so close with dear leader?
Then tell me you think that doing things in Russia isn't possible.
Reasonable observers don't think ukraine could have kept russia's nukes, firstly because they were russia's and not ukraine's, and secondly because a country with less than $100B economy (in shambles at the end of the ussr) can't afford to maintain nuclear surety. Additionally, it's very unclear whether any nukes would have been employed by now. Any nuclear attack on russia would result in total annihilation, and if ukraine could only strike a few high-value targets in exchange, it's not a winning weapon or even a deterrent.
Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.
This time around we must demand that it fully gives up WMDs before any help or humanitarian aid reaches it.
Then you're not paying attention. They have nukes, europe needs their gas, and the other major powers don't care about what they're doing to Ukraine.
America doesn't have hegemony any longer and its leaders and people have been subjugated by foreign powers intelligence actions.
Needed, past tense. The hold-outs today want it, they do not need it.
There's still concern about the nukes though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_progra...
Everything is service or finance economy now. Nobody cares about science sadly (me included).
It's all Netflix & TikTok, Foodora scrolling until the end now.
If they don't have a sufficient secret stock pile of nuclear weapons already, then they have been utter and total fools.
If they don't have secret nuclear weapons in orbit, they have been severely irresponsible.
Let's hope the plans of their leaders is not to send all young men as infantry to the meat grinder to die for a country which hates them, like they are doing in the Ukraine war. But who knows? Life is full of surprises.
The fact that Europe unified against the US, threatening to shoot first, proved they'd rather have an empty piece of ice / dirt, than our friendship and protection. It made me re-evaluate the whole Russia / Ukraine affair.
While Western Europe claimed to be mortal enemies with Russia... the US was providing much of the weapons. While the US was seizing Russian oil tankers, Europe was buying their gas. There's no dispute that the US is against Russia... and yet Europe would turn to fight the US too?
However, Europe doesn't view the US as an ally. Greenland is not enough to change their position, but it's enough to reveal their true position.
Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against. Both sides have the same goal. Russia is killing swaths of European men, and that's about it. Ukraine is killing swaths of European men. The territorial control doesn't explain the war. The killing is the purpose.
By this logic Japan was aligned with USA during WW2, because both sides were killing people.
There's also an absence of an apparent ulterior motive. The US and Japan were also on opposite sides of the world, and had little to no prior history. It's not clear why (or along what lines) they would cooperate with each other in the presence of such real territorial conflict.
Germany is a somewhat closer case. Germany and the US had a shared history and tradition. Socialist / Communist politics were widespread in both, and the US was largely divided as to whether they would support or oppose the German socialists / war. So there is a much stronger case for an ulterior motive here. Indeed, Germany indisputably wanted many of their own people to be killed. Their leadership's desire to kill jewish German is beyond dispute... so as it relates to other classes of Germans (e.g. those who fill the Wiermact ranks)... I don't think we can rule out the possibility on the grounds that those people were (also) German.
However, to get back to the territorial aspect, Germany conquered a lot of land, and the Allies took it back. So, a closer situation to the current stalemate in Ukraine would be WWI. If they're not making any progress in terms of territory... what progress do they think they're making? The main change I see from here is that people are dying... so that's probably the whole point.
I think I need to leave Hacker News soon. It has become MAGA territory
> Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against
This does not follow.
Our relationship has been deteriorating because it was very clear that the US was not behaving like the ally they said they were.
Oh, bullshit.
They threatened to shoot back if invaded.
The US, under Trump, also bombed and sanctioned Iran, a major ally of Russia and supplier of drones and drone parts, and kidnapped Maduro, their staunchest ally in the Western Hemisphere, and tariffed countries buying Russian energy, and seized an actual Russian-flagged (not "shadow") tanker, despite it having a submarine escort--something Europe would never have the will to do.
> Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against
Also note the shift by Canada and Europe to trade more with China. Obviously some trade with China is unavoidable, but seeing them running into the arms of Beijing is quite unexpected, given that China is the single largest consumer of Russian energy exports, and in turn supplies Russia with various restricted, "dual use" components for their drone and other munitions programs, along with vital intelligence for launching strikes in Ukraine.
Is North Dakota worthless land? Is Hawaii? Willing to hand them over?
What the hell is the point of an ally if it's seizing territory from you.
The UNSC has long been toothless on this issue; see North Korea.
Please read Nuclear War: A Scenario, a book by Annie Jacobsen that discusses the insanity of nuclear war.