Logo: to the web site of the Swedish Defence University

This thesis examines how Swedish military planners during the Cold War constructed a future nuclear war as a rational and manageable problem. Drawing on the classified 1962 report of the Kärnladdningsgruppen (Nuclear Warhead Group), produced by the Swedish Defence Staff, the analysis reads the document as an act of strategic imagination, an institutional attempt to render the unthinkable into something that could be planned, calculated and controlled. The study applies three analytically distinct rationality types, instrumental, strategic and organizational, drawing on deterrence theory, scholarship on the imaginary war, and the notion of synthetic facts as the epistemological foundation of Cold War planning. The analysis identifies a core tension running through all sections of the report: the planning assumes that nuclear war can be fought in graduated, geographically bounded and controllable steps, yet the document's own calculations repeatedly undermine this premise. Most starkly, the requirement of 75–200 warheads per major assault set against a total programme ceiling of 100 reveals that Sweden's arsenal would be exhausted in a single operational phase, an engångskrig or one-time war, that structurally precluded the graduated escalation logic the entire concept depended upon. These contradictions are not resolved; they are rendered invisible through the very rationality that makes planning possible. The thesis contributes to a largely unexplored intersection between Swedish nuclear history and the broader field of imaginary war studies, showing how a small non-aligned state constructed its strategic reality under conditions of existential uncertainty, and what that construction concealed.