World entering new era as nuclear powers build up arsenal

16/6/2025 6:11

The world's nuclear-armed

states are beefing up their atomic arsenals and walking out of

arms control pacts, creating a new era of threat that has

brought an end to decades of reductions in stockpiles since the

Cold War, a think tank said on Monday.



Of the total global inventory of an estimated 12,241

warheads in January 2025, about 9,614 were in military

stockpiles for potential use, the Stockholm International Peace

Research Institute said in its yearbook, an annual inventory of

the world's most dangerous weapons.



Around 2,100 of the deployed warheads were kept in a state

of high operational alert on ballistic missiles, nearly all

belonging to either the U.S. or Russia.



SIPRI said global tensions had seen the nine nuclear states

- the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China,

India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel - plan to increase 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 said. "Instead, we see a clear trend of

growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric and the

abandonment of arms control agreements."



SIPRI said Russia and the U.S., which together possess

around 90% of all nuclear weapons, had kept the sizes of their

respective useable warheads relatively stable in 2024. But both

were implementing extensive modernization programmes that could

increase the size of their arsenals in the future.



The fastest-growing arsenal is China's, with Beijing adding

about 100 new warheads per year since 2023. China could

potentially have at least as many intercontinental ballistic

missiles as either Russia or the U.S. by the turn of the decade.



According to the estimates, Russia and the U.S. held around

5,459 and 5,177 nuclear warheads respectively, while China had

around 600.