SHARE
Today the Finnish parliament voted in favour for the government’s proposal to repeal the law that bans nuclear weapons from the country. This means they're removing the 1987 safeguard that prohibited the import, transport, supply and possession of nuclear weapons on Finnish territory.
“Finland sits in Russia’s immediate neighbourhood. For four decades it kept itself safe not by matching threat with threat, but by refusing to escalate. This deliberate tradition of restraint has served Finns well through the Cold War and beyond. Today Parliament abandoned that tradition,” said Melissa Parke, Executive Director of ICAN who thinks this move does not make Finland safer, rather more exposed.
The law dates back to 1987 when Finland was neutral and managing a wary relationship with its neighbour the Soviet Union with which it had fought during the Second World War. Finland had been part of the Russian empire until 1918 when the country gained its independence following the empire’s collapse and the Bolshevik revolution.
Following the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Finland maintained the ban and public opinion in the country was strongly opposed to nuclear weapons.
But, Finnish foreign policy took an abrupt turn in 2023 when the government decided to join NATO because of fear of Russia following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine the year before. The government claims that the law is incompatible with its membership of NATO which relies on nuclear weapons as part of its security strategy. This justification is unconvincing given there is nothing in the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s legal foundation, that requires a member to accept nuclear weapons on its territory. In fact, the treaty does not mention nuclear weapons.
And the Finnish public did not ask for this change. While public opinion in Finland is largely supportive of NATO membership, it remains opposed to nuclear weapons and is specifically opposed to the presence of nuclear weapons on Finnish soil. This has been re-emphasised by a new poll conducted by YouGov for ICAN, that has found that only 18% support the deployment of nuclear weapons in the country, while 58% are opposed.
Some opposition parties, including the Social Democrats and the Left Alliance have been critical of the proposal and polling shows the majority of the public is against the change.
A new poll by the organisation YouGov reveals that a majority of the Finnish public continues to be opposed to the deployment of nuclear weapons in the country.
Respondents: 1004
Fully support: 6 %
Somewhat support: 12 %
Neither support, nor oppose: 25 %
Rather oppose: 25 %
Fully oppose: 33 %
Polling dates: 8th - 11th May 2026 by YouGov
A coalition of civil society organisations and anti-nuclear weapons campaigners, including ICAN Finland, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Finnish Pugwash are opposing the change by pointing out that there is no operational need for Finland to have nuclear weapons on its soil.
Researchers at SIPRI have also said that given Finland is only 160 kilometers from one of Russia’s main bases for its nuclear-armed submarines, this change could lower Moscow’s threshold for pre-emptive strikes. In other words, it would make Finland a nuclear target in the event of a NATO-Russia conflict at a time when tensions between the two are already at a historic high.
In addition to accepting NATO’s strategic dependence on nuclear weapons when it joined the alliance, Finland also declared that its membership of the alliance is incompatible with joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the country started voting against the annual UN General Assembly resolution welcoming the adoption of the Treaty when, previously, it had abstained.
This is another assertion unsupported by any factual or legal basis in NATO’s founding treaty.
Photo: Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive
Finland has robust conventional forces that it built up after the Second World War and which successfully demonstrated to the Soviet Union and later Russia the country’s ability and resolve to defend itself. Nuclear weapons are simply not needed for the defence of Finland, and, in the view of many experts, will actually make Finns less safe.
ICAN’s Executive Director, Melissa Parke, said: “By opening its territory to nuclear weapons, Finland turns itself into an obvious target and lowers the threshold for a pre-emptive strike in any NATO-Russia confrontation. A hard-won posture of security through restraint has been discarded, and the consequences of that choice are as dangerous as they are unknown.”