Fears grow as nuclear arms race on the rise

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned against the danger of nuclear weapon proliferation worldwide, noting that ways of preventing nuclear threats is weakening due to the crises that regions are witnessing from the Middle East to the Korean Peninsula and amid the Russian’s war on Ukraine.

“The clouds that parted following the end of the Cold War are gathering once more,” he said in a speech at the 10th Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in New York on August 1.

Then again, in his visit to Japan to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 5, the UN chief cautioned against the nuclear arms race, calling for its disarmament.

It has been reported that there are approximately 13,400 nuclear warheads around the globe, and more than 2,000 nuclear tests have been conducted so far, according to data from the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs. Both Russia and the US have the lion’s shares (estimated at 90%) among the countries possessing nuclear weapons, with 6,500 and 6,185 warheads, respectively.

Despite the UN warnings, fears regarding nuclear conflict were fueled when Moscow informed Washington that it will temporarily suspend inspections of Russian nuclear facilities under the START treaty, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

“Moscow will continue to abide by the provisions of the START treaty,” it added. The START treaty requires both sides to conduct inspections at bases where the weapons are located, as well as exchange data to verify compliance with the treaty's provisions.

While most major countries are serious about not developing their nuclear arsenals, some of them have threatened to use this weapon as a means of retaliation. The Russian News Agency (TASS) reported that the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control said, “Russia’s doctrine lines on the issue are well known and pretty clear: we hypothetically admit using nuclear response solely to respond to aggression with the use of mass destruction weapons or to respond to aggression using conventional arms if the existence of the state itself is threatened [...] none of those hypothetic scenarios has anything to do with the Ukrainian situation.” His comments were given at the 10th Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Three days after Russia launched its war in Ukraine on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered “to move Russia’s deterrence forces to a special regime of combat duty.”

As for the US, the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan analysis for the US Congress, projected in May 2021 that the US nuclear forces could cost the country $634 billion over the period from 2021 to 2028.

According to Pentagon data on its nuclear arsenal, the US stockpile was approximately 3,708 nuclear warheads until the beginning of 2022, declining from 31,255 in 1967.

However, the Center for Public Integrity issued a report about how the US is developing nuclear warheads to be improved with an ability that can destroy the rival Russian and Chinese nuclear ones. The new components for the nuclear warheads are designed to “determine and set the best height for a nuclear blast,” the report said on October 29, 2021.

“The increased destructiveness of the new warheads means that in some cases fewer weapons could be needed to ensure that all the objectives in the nation’s nuclear targeting plans are fully met,” the report added.

In November 2021, commercial satellite images obtained by researchers at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey showed that China has started building more than 100 nuclear silos in the city of Yumen, the Washington Post reported. However, China’s Fu Cong, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s Arms Control Department refuted the US “claims”, saying “this is untrue.”

“China's nuclear posture is advancing as well, and the secretary said that China will possess at least a thousand nuclear warheads by 2030 and they are building a nuclear triad to deliver them,” the Pentagon said in a report in December 2021.

‘Spending on the rise’

Expenditures on nuclear armaments by the nine nuclear-armed states (the US, China, Russia, the UK, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea) reached $82.4 billion in 2021, compared to $72.6 billion in 2020, with an increase of $9.8 billion (inflation-adjusted increase $6.5 billion), said Geneva-based ICAN in its latest annual report on “Squandered: 2021 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending” in June 2022.

The United States’ expenditure reached $44.2 billion in 2021, increasing from $37.4 billion in 2020, while China comes in the second rank with $11.7 billion last year, compared with $10.1 billion in the previous year. Russia’s spending went up by $0.6 billion from $8 billion to $8.6 billion, the report said.

The UK and France have spent $6.8 billion and $5.9 billion, respectively. Meanwhile, India, Israel and Pakistan spent over $1 billion each, while North Korea spent $642 million, the report added, noting that after digging more reports about the contracts and deals, it found that a dozen of the arms companies made new contracts worth $30.2 billion “to work on nuclear weapons.”

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) projected that the nuclear arsenals of the nine countries would increase over the coming decade despite a “marginal decline” of the nuclear arms stockpile of both the US and Russia, said SIPRI Yearbook 2022 on June 13.

It added that Wilfred Wan, director of SIPRI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program, said, “All of the nuclear-armed states are increasing or upgrading their arsenals, and most are sharpening nuclear rhetoric and the role nuclear weapons play in their military strategies,” noting, “This is a very worrying trend.”