The world’s nuclear-armed states are beefing up their atomic arsenals and strolling out of arms management pacts, creating a brand new period of menace that has introduced an finish to a long time of reductions in stockpiles because the Cold War, a suppose tank stated on Monday.
Of the overall international stock of an estimated 12,241 warheads in January 2025, about 9,614 had been in navy stockpiles for potential use, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute stated in its yearbook, an annual stock of the world’s most harmful weapons.
Around 2,100 of the deployed warheads had been stored in a state of excessive operational alert on ballistic missiles, practically all belonging to both the U.S. or Russia.
SIPRI stated international tensions had seen the 9 nuclear states – the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – plan to extend their stockpiles.
“The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world, which had lasted since the end of the Cold War, is coming to an end,” SIPRI stated. “Instead, we see a clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric and the abandonment of arms control agreements.”
SIPRI stated Russia and the U.S., which collectively possess round 90% of all nuclear weapons, had stored the sizes of their respective useable warheads comparatively secure in 2024. But each had been implementing in depth modernization programmes that would improve the scale of their arsenals sooner or later.
The fastest-growing arsenal is China’s, with Beijing including about 100 new warheads per 12 months since 2023. China might doubtlessly have at the very least as many intercontinental ballistic missiles as both Russia or the U.S. by the flip of the last decade.
According to the estimates, Russia and the U.S. held round 5,459 and 5,177 nuclear warheads respectively, whereas China had round 600.
Source: www.anews.com.tr