Cryria and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Cryria has at various points possessed weapons of mass destruction, including now-dismantled chemical and biological stockpiles. The Kingdom also has a sophisticated civilian nuclear industry and may have conducted a potential nuclear weapons test in addition to developing a collection of delivery systems. However, it does not presently acknowledge the existence of atomic weapons on its soil.
Chemical
Primitive chemical weapons have been used in Cryria since ancient times, however chemical warfare as a modern concept did not appear until the late 19th-century. The establishment of the Cryrian chemical warfare doctrine is largely accredited to General Elise Berggren who apocryphally drew inspiration from industrial chemical accidents she witnessed during her own impoverished childhood in Tuigar.
As an officer in the Cryrian Army she developed a close working relationship with both King Albert and chemist turned industrialist Charles Sundtröm, who first introduced the chloralkali process to Cryrian in 1892. Berggren received support to establish a secretive unit to examine the potential uses of chemical warfare as a means of leveraging Cryrian industrial capabilities and countering its numerical disadvantages, particularly with regards towards maintaining control over an increasingly unsettled empire. This group formed the core of what later become designated as the Special Materials Division. Throughout the 1890s the Division conducted several tests with chlorine-filled shells. Berggren later pushed for combat deployments of the new weapons against restive regions in the mountains of Aikthudr'zhur, but was ultimately denied. Rumors later spread that Berggren had used live test subjects procured by the Tomorrow Ministry, though these remain unsubstantiated. Opposition among the General Staff nearly resulted in the loss of Berggren's position and the disbandment of the Special Materials Division in 1898, however, a successful personal appeal to Queen Katharine saved both and served to set a new attitude by the Ministry of Defense towards chemical warfare in the leadup to the Great War:
The decade of the Great War spurred on the final development of the CDF's chemical warfare doctrines. Instead of being limited to a single specialized unit, chemical shells were now proliferated across the regular army. The inevitable development of countermeasures spurred on the push for more advanced and deadly substances which led away from comparatively simple dual-use chemicals such as chlorine. The Kingdom retained a sophisticated for several decades after the conclusion of the war. These were voluntarily decommissioned in 1970 due to both the perceived military unhelpfulness of such weapons on modern battlefields and their irrelevance for the protection of modern Cryrian interests. At the time of decommissioning, the CDF disclosed a sizable stockpile consisting of blister agents such as mustard gas and nerve agents including sarin and VX.
Former chemical weapons production sites have also been shut down, save for a small number of facilities which produce limited quantities of restricted materials for research, pharmaceutical, and chemical weapons defense testing purposes. These government-run sites are still operated by the Special Materials Division. Among their uses are the production of nitrogen mustard, which has medical uses in extremely limited quantities that would be uneconomical for Cryrian private sector manufacturers. Today, the Special Materials Division also runs facilities for the safe disposal of highly hazardous materials, which were originally set up to dispose of the Cryrian chemical arsenal.
Chemical substances designated as incendiaries, explosives, or defoliants remain in CDF service. Substances for riot control are also utilized in law enforcement contexts.
Biological
Instances of early biological warfare occur throughout Cryrian history. During various conflicts, the Cryrian Church offered absolution and monetary compensation to plague victims who would be willingly transported to hostile lands, while hurling cadavers over the walls of besieged settlements was a common tactic. Advances in germ theory and the Great War resulted in attempts to weaponize anthrax as a means of sabotaging food supplies, but ultimately a lack of viable delivery systems hampered this.
The modern Cryrian biological weapons program began shortly after the Great War in anticipation of a new conflict. At this time the Kingdom was in a state of growing domestic turmoil and had seen its military strength badly weakened by over a decade of continuous warfare. Its foreign influence was simultaneously collapsing with the the loss spheres of influence in Älemsi Negdel and Aikthudr'zhur. The end of the Tanznozhiv and the rise of the Volscine Confederation created a new and potentially dangerous power to the south, one which was now pressing demands against the Leidensen titles over Charlottesborg, which were ultimately ceded in 1923. The rise of militant leftist movements on the Mainland created further pressure on the Cryrian state to restore the means of military deterrence as quickly as possible.
Tomorrow Minister Folke Hägg was the first to propose building upon previous efforts at biological warfare to that end. Both Hägg and the eugenicists at the Tomorrow Ministry theorized that infectious strains capable of inflict damage on a civilizational scale could and would be developed in the near future by various nation states. This would, in essence, create a scenario of mutually assured destruction. While the Tomorrow Ministry's estimations were wildly incorrect, they did lead to the creation of a biological warfare section under the Special Materials Division which spearheaded far more legitimate and scientifically founded research into the topic. Isolated and uninhabited islands in Tynam's Siggeholm Group were used for secretive testing, production, and storage facilities. Research was also conducted under the guise of legitimate civil biotechnology efforts and involved several important Cryrian universities as well as the Ministry of Agriculture.
Cryrian efforts in this area progressed along two lines - One intended to attack enemy food supplies, particularly livestock, and another for sapient targets. The CDF ultimately developed a line of "Anthrax bombs" that would be used to spread the disease across livestock. In 1945, the weapon was tested on over 60 sheep which had been shipped to the island of Jelna, and successfully killed all its targets within days. Despite this, a lack of significant bomber aircraft meant that the delivery of biological agents would likely have relied heavily on more covert means.
The program eventually began to face resistance from within the Special Materials Division itself. In 1956, Director Edvard Afzelius finally proposed an end to the program, reporting that:
Nonetheless, the political power of the Tomorrow Ministry ensured that the program would continue to grow and develop until the White November Crisis of 1957. It is speculated that the Ministry's meddling in military affairs was among the many factors that led to the Crisis. After the downfall of the Ministry, the Cryrian Government began to gradually shut the program down until it had been entirely dismantled in 1960
The CDF disclosed a sizable stockpile of weaponized biological agents ranging from anthrax, plague, tularemia, glanders, brucellosis, Q-fever, botulinum, and orthopoxviruses such as smallpox along with established production lines. The vast majority of these were destroyed along with all delivery systems. Limited samples are retained today under heavy restrictions for testing and research purposes. Some facilities in SIggeholm also remain active for similar purposes, and tightly controlled by the Special Materials Division.
Nuclear
First Weapons Program(1955 - 1975)
Government-sponsored nuclear research in Cryria dates back to 1941 with the founding of the King Albert Materials Institute in Leidenstad. Early experiments with nuclear material were also conducted by civilian researchers at the University of Leidenstad. It was not until after Ethalrian nuclear tests in the 1950s that KAMI was directed by the Ministry of Defense to examine what was known about these new weapons. The Institute's final report would initiate discussions within the Cryrian Government regarding the peaceful and military uses of nuclear technology. Although the military interests in nuclear technology remained shrouded in secrecy, close connections soon formed between it and a civilian nuclear program run by the Ministry of Energy due to both a need to share limited resources and expertise, as well as a desire to conceal military nuclear activities beneath civilian ones. This unique Military-Civil relationship would come to define the Cryrian nuclear program throughout its history.
Basic Materials
Beginning in 1955, KAMI was granted additional funding for nuclear weapons studies, which was granted under the cover of civil programs by the Energy Ministry. By 1956 KAMI had established a sophisticated research program that explored five designated axes - Research, materials acquisition, reactor, enrichment facility, and power plant construction, delivery system development, and weapons assembly. At this point KAMI had an estimated sixty researchers dedicated to these projects, and had sourced another sixty from other government agencies and universities. Materials acquisition became the highest initial priority. The rich Suhar uranium deposit in Tynam would not be discovered for another thirty years as mining exploration and later exploitation were both hampered by local opposition in the region. The Oteri Uranium Mine on the Oshombran Peninsula remained similarly unknown and undeveloped until the 2010s.
Instead, KAMI's efforts centered on the Cryrian Highlands in Älmark which had a wealth of thorium and uranium deposits located on formerly elven lands that had been gradually seized by the Tomorrow Ministry over the past decades. Thorium, at this time, was deemed to have little commercial or military use, while the Highlands' uranium deposits were large but of low-grade and were found in alum shales in the bedrock. As such, mining and processing the ore was more expensive than normal. Negotiations were opened with Älemsi Negdel to potentially access cheaper sources, but these fell through during the First Yeralik Crisis, leaving few alternatives. Beginning in 1957 KAMI's main focus was placed on building experimental reactors and developing methods to utilize Highlands uranium mined at Illukgda to meet civilian and military needs. In that same year the state-owned energy provider RG&E publicly launched a new division to explore the development of nuclear energy options and became the public-facing front for these uranium development projects.
KAMI's projects were briefly disrupted by the White November Crisis towards the end of 1957, but subsequently enjoyed a transfer of funding and resources from the Tomorrow Ministry's soon-to-be defunct bioweapons program. By 1958 the Ministry for Defense had privately expressed its support for a more active and concerted nuclear weapons program in the absence of other forms of deterrence, and KAMI was effectively brought under the umbrella of Special Materials Division. Later internal Ministry reports circulated in 1964 emphasized the growing militarization of the Novaran Cold War and the Kingdom's own nonaligned status which prevented it from benefitting from Great Power conventional or nuclear defense guarantees. This opinion had been openly expressed as early as 1962 by Defense Minister Charles Söderholm, and would later appear in official public statements by the Defense Ministry as a whole.
First Reactors
KAMI planned to use heavy water reactors fueled by its low-grade uranium to produce plutonium, and to that end was able to take advantage of Cryria's position as an early producer of heavy water. The Langtrup and Arensla hydroelectric power plants reportedly furnished KAMI with several tons of heavy water in 1958. The first Cryrian reactor was known as A1 and was built in an underground cavern in the Highlands at the end of 1961. A1 was relatively small, and with a thermal power of 1 MW it existed primarily for further research purposes. That same year, uranium extraction in the Highlands finally reached its intended capacity. In 1965, the Special Materials Division reported to the General Staff that Cryria would be able to rapidly assemble a nuclear device once plutonium production began. A second, larger research reactor named A2 began operations in 1966.
In 1967, the project accelerated when construction began on B1, also known as the Ulholm Nuclear Power Plant. This was a dual-use facility and the first Cryrian nuclear facility that would have a commercial use. Located underground in Ulholm County, south of Honningfjord, the plant provided limited amounts of power to the city. Ulholm was completed in 1972 and like much of the Cryrian nuclear energy program at this time is believed to have had a covert military purpose, namely the production of plutonium. However, as the first reactor of any significant size in Cryria, Ulholm suffered from a number of problems over its short lifespan. While the station's operations were mostly reliable, fuel failures caused a seven-month long shutdown in 1973. Ulholm remained in operation for civilian uses. In 1974 it suffered from flooding which resulted in short-circuits throughout the plant. This resulted in the decision to transfer plans for military production over to the still in construction Hallström or Verventis Power Plants. Ulholm returned to operationality it would ultimately be decommissioned in 1984. The incidents at the plant were not made public by the Cryrian government until 2010.
Verventis
While Ulholm had represented the first Cryrian foray into commercial nuclear power, by 1974 the Kingdom had broken ground on the much larger Verventis Power Plant. Verventis was billed to the public as the first true example of Cryrian nuclear energy, and would provide power to Leidenstad itself. A second project, the Hallström Power Plant, was simultaneously ongoing but had stalled in the planning phases. Work on Verventis also began as the Kingdom both sought to shed the last legacies of the Tomorrow Ministry and simultaneously grappled with the aftermath of the highly controversial election of 1974, which had been marred by allegations of voter suppression and bomb threats in Lielsta. As such, Verventis was subject to a large-scale government publicity campaign that sought to bring focus to it as an example of Cryrian scientific achievement. Privately, Verventis was also expected to help produce an arsenal of a hundred nuclear devices.
The project almost immediately became mired in political conflicts and legal disputes alongside the rest of the program. The Verventis Plant was to be built atop what had once been a holy site for the Highlands elves, and elven groups were able to leverage new Historic Commission regulations to bring about a Court order halting construction. However, the Historic Commission later changes its own regulations in response, allowing the construction to continue. This resulted in elven groups occupying the site. The National Police in turn moved to eject them in a midnight raid, a decision which led to the infamous Verventis Riots. One person is reported to have died directly in the riots, but some 300 were injured and over 800 arrests were reported. Local hospitals in the rural area were overwhelmed by a massive surge in hypothermia cases as the NP used watercannons in the freezing weather, and it is believed that several more deaths occurred in the immediate aftermath of the clash.
It is understood that a simultaneous power struggle took place within the Cryrian government between the Securitate and the General Staff. While the occurrence of any such conflict has been denied by successive governments in Leidenstad, among the end results was the cancellation of the military nuclear program. The civilian program would continue and the Verventis Power Plant would ultimately be completed, but the Cryrian government disavowed the development of nuclear weapons. The Kingdom instead moved towards a doctrine of nuclear latency for the remainder of the 20th-century. Efforts to develop ballistic missile delivery systems were also halted at this point, and the accumulated technology and expertise was instead spun off into what would become the Royal Cryrian Space Agency.
Latency Period
While never publicly codified, Leidenstad effectively changed tacks to pursue a nuclear latency policy after 1975. This was felt to be both more politically palatable given the difficult internal situation in the aftermath of the Verventis Riots, and also better suited to Cryrian defense posture and its wider international position. Under such a doctrine, Cryria was to continue developing its civilian program and through it would remain "A screwturn" away from obtaining nuclear weapons in the event that its national security position came under a severe threat. While rarely discussed openly, it has since become apparent that the Kingdom planned for a six-month breakout period to a nuclear device in the event of a "serious crisis," which encompassed circumstances that might include foreign nuclear threats or dangers to the existence of the Cryrian state itself. The Latency Doctrine fell under the mandate of the Special Materials Division, which also continued to provide protection and oversight for nuclear materials and facilities in the Kingdom.
The transition to the Latency Doctrine and the subsequent transfer of resources away from military purposes allowed the civilian program to flourish. As of 2002, the Kingdom operated nineteen commercial reactors as well as seven smaller ones for research and radiopharmaceutical purposes. All nuclear power plants were controlled by RG&E, though several research reactors were operated by either academic institutions or private enterprises. Since Verventis, Cryrian power plants used the Cryrian Deuterium Uranium(CDU) pressurized heavy-water reactor design, which could utilize unenriched natural uranium or uranium mixed with other materials such as plutonium or thorium. In the decades after the launch of Verventis the Kingdom was able to position itself as a leader in heavy water reactors that can operate on natural uranium.
Since the establishment of the Latency Doctrine, the Kingdom also created a stockpile of nuclear materials from and ostensibly for the civilian program. By 2002 it had accumulated over twenty tons of plutonium and half a ton of uranium. The independent launch capabilities of the RCSA also meant that the country had developed much of the technology needed for an effective delivery system.
Second Weapons Program(2002-2003)
The outbreak of the Volscine Civil War badly upended a security environment on which Cryria had relied on for decades. Fears surrounding the future fate of the Volscine nuclear arsenal and potential rogue actors that might arise from the rubble in West Novaris led the Kingdom to renew its own nuclear ambitions. Dubbed as the Ademar's Gate project, the new program began two weeks after the collapse of Volscina and effectively ended the Latency Doctrine. The imperatives behind the project further escalated when the Charlottesborg Mutiny resulted in the Kingdom transferring formal recognition from the Volscine Confederation to the Volscine Empire while intervening in Charlottesborg itself, a decision which created serious concerns of potential future retaliation by various Volscine factions or a further Cryrian entanglement in the civil war.
Ademar's Gate was intended swiftly develop testable nuclear devices before serious opposition could coalesce. However, the project was detected by the Älemsi government which in turn sought to pressure the Cryrian government into making concessions in the Northern Waters Dispute. This would eventually help lead to the Second Yeralik Crisis.
The Crisis was concluded with the signing of the Solstice Accords. The published versions of the Accords made no reference to the nuclear program, which itself was never publicly acknowledged by the Cryrian government. However, the Accords did see the transfer of nuclear reactors and technology to Älemsi Negdel, and it is thought that other restrictions and inspection regimes were implemented on the weapons program to satisfy Älemsi worries. It is unlikely that these restrictions were intended to wholly stop the development of Cryrian nuclear weapons however, as the Fara Incident took place roughly three months later without protests from the Älemsi government.
Fara Incident
The Fara Incident was an unidentified double-flash of light detected some 200 kilometers off the Cryrian island of Fara within the Kingdom's Loopian Sea EEZ on 30 March, 2002. Although unexplained, the phenomenon resembles the effects of a low-yield nuclear detonation. Further examination was hampered by the remoteness of the location as well as the fact that the Cryrian Navy had declared an exclusion zone around the area, purportedly for ongoing exercises in the aftermath of the recently concluded Second Yeralik Crisis. The latter fact has cemented the idea of Cryrian government involvement in the Incident.
Cryrian vessels had previously denied access to passing Älemsi trawlers, and the Älemsi Ministry of Defense made statements in 2008 indicating its belief that the CDF had conducted a weapons test off Fara Island. Cryria itself has only referred to the Incident as "An unidentified atmospheric event."
Present Day
The Cryrian government has denied suggestions of a nuclear weapons program or the existence of a nuclear arsenal on Cryrian soil in the aftermath of the Fara Incident. Despite some speculation that that the country might adapt its RBS 15 missile system to deliver warheads, or else construct gravity bombs that could be deployed from its Gripen fighter jets, there were few indications of any meaningful steps to do so in the Incident's aftermath.
The matter briefly returned to the spotlight in 2014 when the Kingdom's Kraken-class submarines were equipped with the RBS 20 Fångstarm cruise missile, which were thought to be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. If true, this would give the Kingdom a viable second-strike capability, albeit a limited one given that the Kraken-class is powered by diesel-electric engines and the Fångstarm has not demonstrated a range beyond 1,500 km.
The strongest indication of a Cryrian nuclear deterrent was unveiled in 2018 when the CDF unveiled the development of the Lielsta series of missiles as a part of the Kingdom's defense investments triggered by the Ymirland Civil War. The Lielsta I was determined to be a road-mobile derivative of the Ezethla's Arrow space launch vehicle used by the Royal Cryrian Space Agency. While purportedly a conventional weapon its exact specifications have not been published and its long potential range, low production numbers, costliness, and questionable accuracy when delivering conventional payloads suggest that it may be a strategic weapon intended to deliver nuclear warheads.
Thus, when accounting for the known quantities of these and other related systems, it is estimated that a hypothetical Cryrian nuclear arsenal would be limited to roughly 100-200 deliverable warheads.