https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/04/27/sweden-admits-nuclear-test-says-it-will-not-build-bomb/29ecd3bc-80fe-4786-848c-c995ad6192c5/
Sweden acknowledged yesterday that it conducted secret underground nuclear explosions using weapons-grade plutonium in 1972, but denied published reports that it now has the capability to produce nuclear weapons. The acknowledgment was made in Stockholm by government defense research specialists and confirmed here by a Swedish Embassy spokesman. It said Sweden had halted work on producing an atomic bomb in 1957, but scientists involved in that effort had continued to seek to develop effective defenses against nuclear attack that involved the underground explosions disclosed yesterday. The Swedish defense research specialists emphasized in Stockholm that the amount of plutonium used in the tests had been about a gram, far short of the amount needed to make a nuclear bomb.
News agencies reported from Stockholm that the initial disclosure of the tests, which came Thursday in Ny Teknik, a reputable Swedish technical journal, provoked a political controversy. Nuclear arms-testing would be illegal in Sweden, where the parliament in 1957 banned research geared toward producing a nuclear bomb. Sweden, which considers itself a neutralist country, signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968, thereby pledging not to acquire nuclear weapons production capability.
Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme, who has played a leading role in seeking nuclear-free zones in Europe, said at a press conference that "no nuclear weapon has ever been constructed or exploded in Sweden." But he added that it was sometimes hard to define the limits of "research aimed at protecting the Swedish population against nuclear arms," which Swedish law allows. At present only five countries -- the United States, the Soviet Union, China, France and Britain -- are in the so-called "nuclear club" of countries that openly have nuclear weapons.
Sweden has not generally been listed as a country developing nuclear weapons capability, and the acknowledgment yesterday appeared to catch nuclear weapons specialists in Washington and London off guard. The State Department made no comment. The secret research was conducted by a group of Swedish scientists who had launched an effort to build an atomic bomb in the early l950s, a Swedish official in Washington said.
"In the mid-1950s, we were on a par with France in technical development in the atomic field," Palme said in his press conference. "But while they decided to go on and acquire atomic weapons, we subsequently decided against that." The embassy official here described the research that was carried out after 1957 as "protective," aimed at defending neutral Sweden against nuclear attack, and not at building nuclear weapons. "The whole thing was stopped in 1972," he stated, but he would not say what the research produced.
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Sweden secretly shipped plutonium to US: Bildt
https://www.thelocal.se/20120327/39912/
Sweden recently carried out a secret operation in which three kilogrammes of plutonium was shipped to the United States for disposal, foreign minister Carl Bildt divulged on Tuesday. The plutonium was sent over on the condition that it would be safely destroyed in a cooperative effort to increase worldwide nuclear safety.
“This highly sensitive material has now, under high security … been transferred to the United States for disposal within the framework of the US Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI),” Bildt wrote in an article published in Swedish daily
Dagens Nyheter. The GTRI is aimed at protecting sensitive material to prevent it being used for the production of nuclear devices or in acts of terrorism. The plutonium, which Bildt wrote was shipped to the US “for final and safe disposal”, was allegedly shipped with utmost discretion from the shores of Sweden.
The US government has guaranteed that the plutonium will not be used by the military. Bildt pointed to this cooperation as being a “concrete contribution” by Sweden in the efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear material. The Swedish consignment was shipped by boat “under great discretion,” Bildt said.
“Several countries have previously shipped enriched uranium, but the Swedish contribution breaks new ground because it is the first time that reprocessed plutonium has been transferred within the framework of the GTRI,” he added. He wrote that the plutonium has its background in Swedish research and development programmes from the 1950s and 1960s. Most of it comes from the now-closed Ågesta nuclear reactor outside Stockholm, while smaller amounts were acquired “at an early stage” from the United States and Britain for research into nuclear weapons.
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SKI Report 01:33
Sweden and the Bomb
The Swedish Plans to Acquire Nuclear Weapons,
1945–1972
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/32/056/32056064.pdf
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