The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Nukes for All! (But Finland First) || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Finland knows all too well what a confrontation with Russia would mean. So, the Finns are preparing... Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4afjB9q

Everybody, Peter Zine here. No fancy backdrop today, sorry. The news we need to discuss happened last week on the 18th of June, and it's that the Finnish Parliament with a two-thirds majority voted to basically legalize nukes, the transport of them, the storage of them, and the production of them. Finland has always been in a difficult position vis-à-vis one country, Russia. They only have a few million people in Finland. They're all concentrated, basically, on the southern coast and in and around the capital of Helsinki. They've always faced down the Russians who outnumbered them in any meaningful fight, several to one.

The last big fight was the Winter War of 1940, 1941, where in some of the battles, the Finns inflicted 40 to 1 casualty ratios on the Russians, which is crazy. But eventually they knew they would have to suffer some sort of peace deal. And in the peace deal, they gave up territory where almost a quarter of their population lived. there is no version of any future in which Russia exists where another war is not inevitable. And when the Ukraine war started back in 2022, the current phase of the Ukraine war started back in 2022. Sorry. The Finns knew that eventually that fight was going to be coming for them.

From the Russian point of view, there is no version of their western periphery that doesn't include, among other things, a big chunk of Poland, all of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and another big chunk of Finland. The Russians feel they need to occupy all of that in order to have a better cordon in a defensive manner. You know, that's great for the Russians, but it's bad if you happen to live in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or Sinland.

And so the Finns are rearming, and they're getting ready for that fight. And they know at the end of the day, there is no guarantee that they can win because just like the Winter War in 1940 and 1941, they are massively outnumbered, even if they can get allies to come to their aid. Well, in just the last,

Last week, the United States said that if there is a war with the Russians, they're not sending any appreciable hardware to assist. And that absolutely colored the decision-making in Finland. So the Finns will not simply be hosting somebody else's nukes. They're going to develop their own deterrent. And they will not be alone because the Finns aren't the only ones in this situation. We're also going to see nuclear programs expanding in Sweden, in Poland, in Germany, and Romania, all countries that already have the technical skills. necessary to make a nuclear program a reality. We're also probably going to see something like this in East Asia, where the United States is equally odd these days. And that means you should expect

to see meaningful nuclear programs in Japan, in Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan as well. The only way you can convince the Finns and the Japanese and the rest that this is not necessary is for a robust multilateral alliance guaranteed by the United States. But that is exactly the circumstances of the Trump administration is unraveling, so instead we're going to get at least another half a dozen nuclear powers in the broader world.