*STOCKHOLM: *The overall number of nuclear warheads in the world hasdeclined in the past year but nations are modernising their arsenals, areport published Monday on said.
At the start of 2019, the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China,India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea had a total of some 13,865 nuclearweapons, according to estimates in a new report by the StockholmInternational Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
That represents a decrease of 600 nuclear weapons compared to the start of2018.
But at the same time all nuclear weapon-possessing countries aremodernising these arms – and China, India and Pakistan are also increasingthe size of their arsenals.
“The world is seeing fewer but newer weapons,” Shannon Kile, director ofthe SIPRI Nuclear Arms Control Programme and one of the report’s authors,said.
The drop in recent years can mainly be attributed to the US and Russia,whose combined arsenals still make up more than 90 per cent of the world’snuclear weapons.
This is in part due to the countries fulfilling their obligations under theNew START treaty — which puts a cap on the number of deployed warheads andwas signed by the US and Russia in 2010 — as well as getting rid ofobsolete warheads from the Cold War era.
The START treaty is however due to expire in 2021, which Kile said wasworrying since there are currently “no serious discussions underway aboutextending it”.
Next year the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) —considered the cornerstone of the world’s nuclear order— turns 50.
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The number of nuclear arms has been drastically reduced since a peak in themid-1980s when there were some 70,000 nuclear warheads in the world.
While Kile said progress should not be underestimated, he also noted anumber of worrying trends, such as the build-up of nuclear arms on bothsides of the border between India and Pakistan, and the danger of aconventional conflict escalating to a nuclear one.
There is also a more general trend towards an “increased salience” ofnuclear weapons, where changing strategic doctrines, particularly in theUS, are giving nuclear weapons an expanded role in both military operationsand national security dialogue, Kile said.
“I think the trend is moving away from where we were five years ago, wherethe world’s nuclear weapons were being marginalised,” Kile said.
Former UN chief Ban Ki-moon recently urged nuclear powers to “get serious”about disarmament and warned there was a “very real risk” that decades ofwork on international arms control could collapse following the US pulloutof the Iran nuclear deal, which he said sent the wrong signal to NorthKorea.
Global disarmament efforts also suffered a blow when the United Statesannounced in February it would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range NuclearForces (INF) treaty, prompting Russia to say it would also suspend itsparticipation. -APP/AFP
