The world’s number of operational atomic warheads increased in 2022, drivenlargely by Russia and China, a new report out Wednesday said as nucleartensions have risen since the war in Ukraine.
The nine official and unofficial nuclear powers held 9,576 ready-to-usewarheads in 2023 — up from 9,440 the year prior, according to the NuclearWeapons Ban Monitor published by the NGO Norwegian People’s Aid.
Those weapons have a “collective destructive power” equal to “more than135,000 Hiroshima bombs,” the report said.
The figures are published as Moscow has repeatedly raised the nuclearthreat in connection to its invasion of Ukraine and Western military aid tothe Eastern European country.
On Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he had agreedwith Minsk to deploy “tactical” nuclear weapons in Belarus, a country onthe EU’s doorstep.
The additional 136 warheads to the ready-to-use global nuclear stockpilelast year were attributed to Russia, which has the world’s largest arsenalwith 5,889 operational warheads, as well as China, India, North Korea andPakistan.
“This increase is worrying, and continues a trend that started in 2017,”editor of the Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor, Grethe Lauglo Ostern, said in astatement.
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At the same time, the total stockpile of nuclear weapons, which alsoincludes those removed from service, continues to decline.
In the same year, the number of nuclear weapons fell from 12,705 to 12,512,due to the decommissioning of old warheads in Russia and the United States.
But Ostern warned that unless the trend of new warheads being added doesnot stop, “the total number of nuclear weapons in the world will also soonincrease again for the first time since the Cold War.”
The eight official nuclear powers are the United States, Russia, Britain,France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea, while Israel is known tohave nuclear weapons unofficially. -APP/AFP