SMALL SWEDISH EARTHQUAKE

Andrew Brown on Sweden's

atom bomb, never built but still explosive

NOTHING spectacular ever really hap- pens in Sweden; if it seems to, this is misleading; yet it has still been a spectacu- larly bad month for Olof Palme's Social Democratic government. Four weeks ago all manner of wonderful things were pre- dicted. Even spring was on its way after what was meant to be the longest winter for 200 years (a statistic constantly reiter- ated, like the drip from a melting icicle, until it became itself another part of the misery of late winter).

One of the brighter Social Democrats was in London, a man whose thankless task it is to go round after the foreign minister explaining what he would have meant had he understood what he should have said. On this occasion, the foreign minister was safely in Stockholm, where he can do surprisingly little harm, and the bright young man lectured assembled jour- nalists on why the Social Democrats were going to win the next election.

'We will say, like Reagan, just look at our record.'

So look at it: since then, the country has been almost paralysed by civil servants, striking for an extra £18 a month (before tax, say about £2 a week after tax), who shut every airport and port; interest rates have risen by nearly four per cent in a single day, so that they are now the highest in Europe; and to the usual arguments about Russian submarines has been added the delightful prospect of a Swedish atomic bomb, tested, if one may believe the Times, in a suburb of Stockholm.

Monetarism, strikes, and an indepen- dent nuclear deterrent are hardly the things for which the Social Democrats would like to be remembered; still less are they the policies that might win the general election next autumn. But they are not random misfortunes. They are all in their separate ways symbols of powerlessness, something which it may be harder for a Swedish government to come to terms with than it would be for others.

The bomb story demonstrates the powerlessness of Swedish governments in their relations with the rest of the world.

Because it all happened 20 years or more ago, it also demonstrates the way in which the Social Democrats used always to end up on the winning side. Sweden may well be the only country in the world that is undeniably capable of building a bomb, and which has — now — unequivocally renounced the possibility. The Swedes have not only the technology, and the largest nuclear power programme in the world, but also the uranium necessary for a bomb. It's fairly low-grade ore, but there's an awful lot of it; and this it was that first drew them into the nuclear circle after the end of the second world war.

The Russians then occupied Finland, and the thought of all the uranium so accessible on their western border was very tempting. They tried to arrange to buy it and only great American pressure dis- suaded the Swedes from selling it.

The Russians eventually got their bomb without Swedish help, and then everybody wanted one. In those days, the devices were thought of as just a way to produce a bigger and better bang, without the apoca- lyptic nimbus that now surrounds them. Two things acted to dissuade the Social Democrats from building one. The first was the growing revulsion against the use of strategic nuclear weapons in the late Fifties. This need not have worried the Swedish armed forces, and didn't: they were interested in tactical nuclear weapons, which make a lot of sense as an answer to the problem of defending Lap- land. Where better could one use a bomb than in a landscape that looks as if already ravaged by a nuclear explosion?

But the then prime minister was per- suaded by the arguments of his foreign minister that the Great Powers would never allow a little country like Sweden to 'I suppose they stand close together to prop each other up.' have its own bomb (what about the French? one is tempted to ask) and that possession of an effective deterrent would make Sweden a target in the first few days of any war. So, since the bomb was no practical use to the Swedes, the way was cleared to regard it as wholly immoral hence the shock produced when all the details came out this spring, and it emerged that the army had continued small-scale research into the matter until the early Seventies, when minute quantities of plu- tonium were exploded in a southern sub- urb of Stockholm to see what special properties it had.

The decision to renounce atomic weapons was in many ways an admirable one. It ensured the survival of the conscript army, which, while it frightens no one, not even the recruits, promotes social cohesion and suppresses unemployment. But why sneer at the Swedish army when one could laugh at the navy instead?

The economy is a more serious matter, as any Swede will tell you. The powerless- ness of the government in this field is far more worrying to the Social Democrats, who would like to sell themselves as the party of competents: they alone can square the unions; they alone can take decisive action; they can in fact do everything that they spent six years in opposition heckling their 'bourgeois' opponents for attempting. And now it seems they can't.

This may seem odd: the Swedish state is so powerful, so large and so rich, that surely the government can do anything it wants? But in fact the sheer complexity and size of the state render it immobile. So the government attempted to enforce an incomes policy by a mixture of pious exhortation in public and less pious ex- hortations in private. This seemed to be working so well that, since there is an election this year, the finance minister felt able to promise every taxpayer a large cash rebate in time for the summer holidays. The civil servants decided to get in there first, and took advantage of a slight ambi- guity in the winter's wage settlements to strike for a fortnight. They shut every civil airport in the country; all the customs posts, and with them all the foreign trade; and many schools.

This led to a run on the Krona, which forced interest rates smartly upwards. Since it is one of the peculiarities of Swedish life that everyone borrows slightly more than they can afford, the government will be deservedly unpopular as a result.

But anything was better than another devaluation: the government's first act on

coming into office was to devalue the krona by 16 per cent and announce that this was the last and final devaluation — which it was, at least until the next elec- tion's safely over.

'None of this threatens civilisation as it is threatened in Denmark, where a strike has shut the Tuborg and Carlsberg breweries as the Whitsun carnival approaches. The moral is clear. Don't vote for a bourgeois government.