Sweden, Denmark sign agreement to deepen peacetime defense cooperation.

Nordic neighbors Sweden and Denmark on Thursday entered an agreement to deepen the countries' peacetime defense cooperation.

The agreement would serve to "increased access to our countries' air spaces and territorial waters during peacetime," the Swedish defense ministry's statement read.

"The benefit is that we can use each other's infrastructure. By working together with information exchange we will continually have a common understanding of what is happening in the Oresund region," Sweden's Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist said earlier in an interview with the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Sweden and Denmark will be able to share information, airbases and ports, the paper reported.

Sweden, which remained neutral during the Second World War, decided not to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) when it was founded in 1949. Denmark, on the other hand, is a founding member of the alliance. Endit