Global spending on nuclear weapons is estimated to have increased by thirteen percent to ninety-one billion four hundred million dollars during 2023. This estimate was based on calculations from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) pressure group.
The new total spending is up ten billion seven hundred million dollars from the previous year. The increase is driven largely by sharply increased defense budgets in the U.S. This is a time of wider geopolitical uncertainty caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war.
All nine of the nations with nuclear weapons are spending more, ICAN added. China is judged to be the second largest spender with a budget of twelve billion dollars. China’s total is well below the fifty-one billion nine hundred million dollars attributed to the US.
Russia is the third largest spender, at eight billion three hundred billion dollars. They are followed by the U.K. at eight billion one hundred million dollars and France at six billion one hundred million dollars. Estimates for authoritarian states or the three countries with undeclared nuclear program (India, Pakistan and Israel) are all complicated by a major lack of transparency.
Susy Snyder is one of the authors of the research. She warned that nuclear states are “on course to be spending one hundred billion dollars a year on nuclear weapons” and said that the money could be used on environmental and social programs instead.
Snyder said, “These billions could have been used for combating climate change and saving animals and plants that sustain life on Earth from extinction, not to mention improving health and education services around the world.”
Over the past five years nuclear weapons spending has soared by thirty-four percent or twenty-three billion four hundred million dollars. Spending by the U.S. increased by forty five percent during that time and by forty-three percent in the U.K., and at current trends will surpass one hundred billion dollars in 2024.
Vladimir Putin is Russia’s president. He has referred repeatedly to his country’s nuclear arsenal to warn the west of a direct military intervention in Ukraine since launching the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Russia also started a series of exercises simulating the use of tactical nuclear weapons near the Ukrainian border in May.
Data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that the total number of active nuclear warheads is also slightly higher, at five thousand five hundred and eighth five. This increase has been driven largely by China increasing its arsenal from four hundred and ten to five hundred.
The largest nuclear states are the U.S. and Russia, who possess around ninety percent of all warheads. Russia has four thousand eighty nuclear warheads deployed or in storage, compared with the US three thousand seven hundred and eight.
The SIPRI researchers said that “Russia is estimated to have deployed about 36 more warheads with operational forces than in January 2023.” However, they added that there was no firm evidence that Moscow had deployed any of its nuclear missiles in Belarus, despite public statements from Putin and Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko.
Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal is estimated to remain unchanged at two hundred and twenty-five warheads (as is France’s at two hundred and ninety warheads). However, three years ago the U.K. said it would raise the cap on the number of warheads it was willing to stockpile to two hundred and sixty Trident warheads to counter perceived threats from Russia and China.
Wilfred Wan is the director of SIPRI’s weapons of mass destruction program. He said, “We have not seen nuclear weapons playing such a prominent role in international relations since the cold war.”
He contrasted the numbers of warheads deployed with a joint statement signed by the U.S., U.K., France, China and Russia in 2022. Building on earlier statements, the five countries with the most nuclear warheads declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”.