N-arms decline stalls as nations modernise arsenals

Stockholm: As nuclear nations commit to renewing and sometimes expanding their arsenals, a decline seen since the early 1990s seems to have stalled, with some signs of a numerical increase, researchers said on Monday

"The reduction of nuclear arsenals that we have gotten used to since the end of the Cold War appears to be levelling out," Hans Kristensen, associate senior fellow at SIPRI’s Nuclear Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-proliferation Programme, told AFP.

The amount of nukes among the nine nuclear-armed states -- the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea -- totalled 13,080 at the start of 2021, a slight decrease from 13,400 a year earlier, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated.

However, this includes retired warheads waiting to be dismantled, and without them the combined military stockpile of nuclear arms rose from 9,380 to 9,620. Meanwhile, the number of nuclear weapons deployed with operational forces increased from 3,720 to 3,825, the report said.

Of these, some 2,000 were kept in a "kept in a state of high operational alert," meaning for launch in a matter of minutes. "We’re seeing very significant nuclear modernisation programmes all around the world and in all the nuclear weapons states," Kristensen said.

He added that nuclear states also seem to be raising "the importance they attribute to the nuclear weapons in their military strategies." This change can be observed in both Russia and the United States, which together possess over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, Kristensen said, stressing it was too early to say if the new US administration under President Joe Biden would deviate from the strategy under his predecessor Donald Trump.

"I think that the Biden administration is signalling quite clearly that it is going to continue the overwhelming main thrust of the nuclear modernisation programme that was underway during the Trump years," the researcher said, noting the programme was started under Barack Obama.