The three Asian nuclear powers of China, India and Pakistan have expanded their nuclear arsenals by about 10 nuclear warheads each over the past year against the backdrop of a ‘fragile’ peace across the continent, said the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in its just-released annual report.
While China’s arsenal has risen from 240 to 250 warheads at the beginning of 2013, Pakistan’s is up from the estimated 90-110 last year to 100-120 this year and India’s is up from 80-100 to 90-110, said the Swedish think tank, adding that India and Pakistan are also expanding their missile delivery capabilities.
As for the five legally-recognised nuclear weapon States (the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom), the report states that they all are “either deploying new nuclear weapon deliver systems or have announced programmes to do so”.
The Big 2 — the US and Russia — have marginally reduced their massive inventories in terms of the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START), besides retiring ageing and obsolescent weapons.
Even so, their arsenals continue to be of daunting proportions. Russia’s stands at 8,500 warheads, down from 10,000 in 2012. The US’s is at 7,700 warheads, down from 8,000.
“Once again there was little to inspire hope that the nuclear weapon-possessing states are genuinely willing to give up their nuclear arsenals. The long-term modernisation programmes under way in these states suggest that nuclear weapons are still a marker of international status and power,” said SIPRI’s Senior Researcher Shannon Kile.
Of the five major nuclear powers, China is the only one to have expanded its arsenal. France and the UK have frozen theirs at 300 and 225 warheads respectively.
Overall, the SIPRI report says that the five recognised nuclear powers and the other three (India, Pakistan, Israel), between them, possess approximately 4,400 operational nuclear weapons.
“Nearly 2000 of these are kept in a State of high operational alert,” it says, adding: “If all nuclear warheads are counted, these (eight) States together possess a total of approximately 17,265 nuclear weapons, as compared with 19,000 at the beginning of 2012.” The report estimates Israel’s arsenal at 80 nuclear warheads.
Commenting on the Asian expansion of warheads, SIPRI says it is all the more disturbing because of the “fragile” peace in Asia, saying it has been marked by growing tensions since 2008 between India and Pakistan, China and Japan, the two Koreas and others.
“While States have avoided direct conflict with each other and have stopped supporting insurgent movements on each other’s territory, decades-old suspicions linger and economic integration has not been followed up with political integration,” noted the report.