Nuclear-armed countries are increasingly dependent on nuclear weapons

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The world's nine nuclear-armed states continue to modernize their nuclear weapons as they rely more on such deterrence in 2023, a Swedish think tank said Monday.

“We haven't seen nuclear weapons play such an important role in international relations since the Cold War,” said Wilfred Wan, director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction program at the International Peace Research Institute. Stockholm.

Earlier this month, Russia and its ally Belarus launched a second stage of exercises aimed at training their troops in tactical nuclear weapons, part of the Kremlin's efforts to discourage the West from increasing its support for Ukraine.

In a separate report, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), said the nine nuclear-armed states spent a combined $91.4 billion on their arsenals in 2023, the equivalent of equivalent of $2,898 per second. The Geneva-based coalition of disarmament activists won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.

The group said the figures show a $10.7 billion increase in global spending on nuclear weapons in 2023 compared to 2022, with the United States accounting for 80% of that increase. The United States' share of total spending, $51.5 billion, is greater than that of all other nuclear-armed countries combined.

“There has been a notable upward trend in the amount of money spent on developing these most inhumane and destructive weapons over the past five years,” said Alicia Sanders-Zakre, policy and research coordinator at ICAN.

The second biggest spender was China at $11.8 billion, she said, with Russia coming in third at $8.3 billion.

“All this money doesn’t improve global security, it actually threatens people wherever they live,” Sanders-Zakre said.

SIPRI estimates that some 2,100 of the deployed warheads were kept on high operational alert on ballistic missiles, and almost all of them belong to Russia or the United States. However, he said China would also have some nuclear warheads on high operational alert for the first time.

“Unfortunately, we continue to see a year-over-year increase in the number of operational nuclear warheads,” said Dan Smith, director of SIPRI. He added that the trend is likely to accelerate in the coming years “and is extremely concerning.”

Russia and the United States together possess nearly 90% of all nuclear weapons, SIPRI said. The size of their military stockpiles appears to have remained relatively stable in 2023, although Russia is believed to have deployed about 36 more military warheads with its operational forces than in January 2023, the watchdog added.

In its SIPRI Yearbook 2024, the institute indicates that transparency regarding nuclear forces has declined in both countries following Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and that debates around Nuclear sharing agreements have grown in importance.

Washington suspended its bilateral strategic stability dialogue with Russia, and last year Moscow announced it was suspending its participation in the New START nuclear treaty.

Of the total global inventory of approximately 12,121 nuclear warheads as of January, approximately 9,585 were in military stockpiles for potential use. An estimated 3,904 of these warheads were deployed with missiles and aircraft – 60 more than in January 2023 – and the rest were in central storage.

In Asia, India, Pakistan and North Korea are all seeking to deploy multiple nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles, the institute said. The United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and China already have this capability, allowing for a potential rapid increase in the number of deployed warheads, as well as the possibility for countries with the weapon nuclear power to threaten to destroy many more targets.

SIPRI stressed that all estimates were approximate and that the institute annually revises its data on global nuclear forces based on new information and updates to previous assessments.