Geneva
In this photo released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on April 20, 2022, a Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is fired from Plesetsk in northwestern Russia following a military announcement that it would conduct drills involving lethal nuclear weapons.
Nuclear-armed states have stepped up modernization of their nuclear arsenals amid rising geopolitical tensions, increasing spending on their nuclear weapons stockpiles by a third over the past five years, two reports released on Monday said.
The world's nine nuclear-weapon states spent a combined $91 billion on their nuclear weapons last year, according to a new report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
The report and another by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) suggest that nuclear-weapon states are significantly increasing spending as they modernize their nuclear arsenals and deploy new types of nuclear weapons.
“It is no exaggeration to say we are in a nuclear arms race,” ICAN director Melissa Park told AFP.
Meanwhile, Wilfred Wang, head of SIPRI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme, warned in a statement that “not since the Cold War have nuclear weapons played such a significant role in international relations”.
The SIPRI report said the total number of nuclear warheads in the world had fallen slightly from 12,512 last year to 12,121 at the start of this year.
But 9,585 of the warheads, including some older ones due to be dismantled, remain stockpiled for possible use, nine more than a year ago.
Additionally, 2,100 aircraft were placed on “high operational alert” for ballistic missiles.
Most of these warheads are held by the United States and Russia, but for the first time, China is also thought to have high operational alert-level nuclear warheads, according to SIPRI.
“As Cold War-era arsenals are gradually dismantled, the total number of nuclear warheads in the world continues to decline, but unfortunately the number of operational warheads continues to increase each year,” said SIPRI director Dan Smith.
Surge in Nuclear Weapons Spending
The surge in spending reported by ICAN seems to bear that out.
According to the report, global nuclear weapons spending will increase by $10.8 billion in 2023 alone from the previous year, with the United States accounting for 80% of that.
The US share of the total spending, $51.5 billion, is “more than all other nuclear-weapon states combined,” ICAN said.
The next largest spender was China with $11.8 billion, followed by Russia with $8.3 billion.
Meanwhile, spending in the UK increased significantly for the second consecutive year, increasing 17% to $8.1 billion.
Spending in 2023 by nuclear-armed states – which also include France, India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea – is up more than 33 percent from $68.2 billion in 2018, when ICAN first began collecting this data, the report said.
Since then, nuclear-armed states have spent a total of $387 billion on lethal weaponry, the report shows.
“Investing in Armageddon”
Park condemned the “billions of dollars wasted on nuclear weapons” as a “serious and unacceptable misallocation of public funds.”
She stressed that the funding is more than what the World Food Programme estimates is needed to end world hunger.
“For every minute spent on nuclear weapons, we could plant a million trees,” she said.
“These figures are outrageous and are money spent on weapons that countries say will never be used,” she said, pointing to nuclear deterrence theory.
Such investments are not only wasteful, she warned, but extremely dangerous.
“What happens if deterrence fails?”
Geneva-based ICAN won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its leading role in drafting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which came into force in 2021.
So far, 70 countries have ratified the treaty and many more have signed it, but none of the nuclear-weapon states are party to it.
“Instead of investing in Armageddon, the nine nuclear-weapon states should follow the example of nearly half the world's countries, join the treaty and make a real contribution to global security,” said Alicia Sanders Zakre, co-author of Monday's ICAN report.