There have been a lot of stories in the press lately about increasing tensions between nuclear armed nations and the need for nuclear disarmament. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is a think-tank that is partially funded by the Swedish government. It was created in 1996 to focus on global security, arms control and disarmament. It just issued its annual report on the status of the world's nuclear arsenals. This report presents the current status of the nuclear weapons possessed by the nine nations currently recognized to have nuclear fission and nuclear fusion weapons.
The following numbers are estimates of the major nuclear warheads possessed by each nation. Russia has seven thousand and three hundred. The United States has seven thousand. France has three hundred, China has two hundred and sixty, United Kingdom has two hundred and fifteen, Pakistan has one hundred and thirty, India has one hundred and twenty, Israel has eighty and North Korea may have up to ten. The total number of warheads is thought to have fallen by about four hundred since last year. About four thousand warheads are currently on missiles or at bases with operations forces and ready for immediate launch. These warheads are possessed by the U.S., Russia, Britain and France. At the height of the Cold War, there were about seventy thousand nuclear warheads in the world.
Although the number of warheads has dropped sharply since the Cold War because of severe reduction in U.S. and Russia nuclear arsenals, both countries are in the process of modernizing their nuclear forces with the U.S. committed to spend up to one trillion dollars in the next thirty years. China, India and Pakistan have announced plans for new delivery systems. North Korea claims to have created warheads that are compact enough to be fitted on a missile but that cannot be verified.
The U.S. and Russia have committed to deploying a maximum of one thousand, five hundred and fifty nuclear warheads as required by the 2010 START treaty but they have yet to fully comply with that goal. Many skeptics say that they doubt that the world's nuclear armed nations, especially the U.S. and Russia would ever give up all their nuclear warheads. In any case, regardless of what any nation claimed, it would be just about impossible to verify the absence of nuclear weapons.
Russia has been threatening to use tactical nuclear devices in eastern Europe against NATO ground forces in a future conflict. Pakistan is deploying tactical nuclear weapons to its border with India for use against Indian ground forces. The U.S. is working on a nuclear bomb that has variable yield and much greater accuracy. China is considering deploying nuclear missile subs in the South China Sea because of territorial disputes. The U.S. is deploying antimissile batteries in eastern Europe and South Korea which is destabilizing the situations there. The possibility of all out nuclear war is increasing.
SIPRI Nuclear Weapons Project head and study co-author Shannon Kile commented that "Despite the ongoing reduction in the number of weapons, the prospects for genuine progress towards nuclear disarmament remain gloomy. All the nuclear weapon-possessing states continue to prioritize nuclear deterrence as the cornerstone of their national security strategies."
