In 1939, central figures in Norway’s scientific and military establishment understood something that has never been fully acknowledged: that an atomic bomb was theoretically possible, that heavy water was likely to be a critical ingredient, and that Norway — through Norsk Hydro’s plant at Rjukan — sat on the world’s only significant supply of it. When Germany invaded in the spring of 1940 and the Norwegian campaign collapsed within two months, the same people drew a conclusion that has remained hidden in plain sight ever since: Norway should pursue its own nuclear capability, independently, and if necessary behind the backs of its British and American allies.
This is the central argument of Norway’s Atomic Village: The Secret Military Network Behind the Heavy Water War. It is a revision of the established historical narrative — one that reframes a series of well-known events in an entirely new light.
The famous sabotage operations at Rjukan, celebrated as acts of Allied resistance, look different when viewed through this lens: they were also operations in which Norwegian actors had their own strategic interests, not always aligned with London or Washington. The diplomatic manoeuvrin
g around the first United Nations General Assembly in 1946 — at which Norway’s Foreign Minister Trygve Lie was appointed the organisation’s first Secretary-General — takes on new significance when understood against the background of what Norwegian decision-makers knew about their country’s nuclear potential. And the decision, ultimately, not to produce a Norwegian weapon becomes a more complex and deliberate choice than the standard account suggests.
These questions are not merely historical. Europe is again debating the foundations of its own security, its energy future, and its relationship with nuclear technology — this time with the added dimension of artificial intelligence and the enormous energy demands of data centre infrastructure. The strategic logic that drove a small nation to secretly pursue nuclear capability in the 1940s and 1950s is not entirely remote from the calculations being made in European capitals today.
The book grew out of a personal investigation. A chance encounter with a librarian at the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum led me to ask a question I had never thought to ask about my own grandfather — Colonel Karl Arnulf, who served as Quartermaster General of the Norwegian Armed Forces, was present at the collapse of 1940, operated within the exile networks running through neutral Sweden, and was closely connected to the scientific and industrial figures who built the post-war nuclear programme at Kjeller. He never spoke about any of it. Reconstructing what he knew, and when, became the thread that pulled the larger historical argument into focus.
As a psychologist who has spent his career studying leadership, networks and organisational behaviour, I was drawn not only to the historical facts but to the social architecture behind them: the tightly bound networks of officers, scientists and industrialists, forged at military college and under occupation, that sustained a decades-long collective silence. The book is as much a study of how informal organisations preserve secrets as it is a work of military and diplomatic history.
The English edition is a close translation of the Norwegian original, published by Norwegian University Press in 2021, carried out by the author with the assistance of Claude, the AI system developed by Anthropic.
Norway’s Atomic Village is available as a paperback and as an e-book on Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo and other major platforms.
Some visual presentations of the ideas can be found here on youtube (norwegian voice but English subtitles):