This article covers the history of Sweden from the end of World War II to 1967. Overview Sweden emerged unharmed by World War II. The Swedish non-alignment policy officially remained – Sweden rejected NATO membership but joined the United Nations and later EFTA. Tage Erlander of the Social Democratic party was Prime Minister from 1946 to 1969 – a period of exceptional economic and social prosperity, and generally low unemployment, but the housing situation posed problems as more and more people moved to the cities. Responding to the housing shortage, the government introduced the Million Programme – a national wave of suburban development with the aim of creating a million homes from 1965 to 1974. This period saw the beginning of large-scale immigration to a country that used to be one of the more ethnically homogeneous in the world. The first phase of immigration consisted of workers from southern Europe, who were actively wooed over by campaigns of advertisement and recruitment in their home countries, for instance Italy & Austria. On 3 September 1967, Sweden was the last country in continental Europe to introduce right-hand traffic. This was done on Dagen H, in spite of the negative result of a referendum in 1955. Swedish neutrality in the Cold War During the Cold War, Sweden maintained a dual approach: publicly, the strict neutrality policy was forcefully maintained but, unofficially, strong ties were kept with the US and it was hoped that the US would use conventional and nuclear weapons to strike at Soviet staging areas in the occupied Baltic states in case of a Soviet attack on Sweden. Over time and due to the official neutrality dogma, fewer and fewer Swedish military officials were aware of the military cooperation with the west, making such cooperation in the event of war increasingly difficult. At the same time, Swedish defensive planning was completely based on help from abroad in the event of war. The fact that it was not permissible to mention this aloud eventually led to the Swedish armed forces becoming highly unbalanced. For example, a strong ability to defend against an amphibious invasion was maintained while an ability to strike at inland staging areas was almost completely absent. In the 1970s and 1980s, Sweden's military expenditure per capita was the highest in the world. Because of neutrality politics, most military equipment was produced and developed in Sweden by companies such as