SIPRI releases ‘State of Armaments, Disarmament and International Security’

• Global inventory of nuclear warheads has increased over the past year as per SIPRI’s latest ‘State of Armaments, Disarmament and International Security’.

ABOUT STATE OF ARMAMENTS, DISARMAMENT AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY

• It is an annual assessment of the Sweden-based think tank Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
• As on January 2023, the world has 9,576 nuclear weapons in military stockpiles for potential use.
  • That is an increase of 86 weapons from January 2022.
• Of this stockpile, an estimated 3,844 warheads were ‘deployed’ with missiles and aircraft.
• Around 2,000 of these ‘deployed’ weapons — nearly all of which belonged to Russia or the USA—were kept in a state of high operational alert.
  • This means that they were fitted to missiles or held at airbases hosting nuclear bombers.
• Nine nuclear-armed states — the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel — continue to modernise their nuclear arsenals and have deployed several new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapon systems in 2022.
• The estimate of the size of China’s nuclear arsenal increased from 350 warheads in January 2022 to 410 in January 2023.
• India was estimated to have a growing stockpile of about 164 nuclear weapons, up from 160 the previous year.
  • These weapons were assigned to a maturing nuclear triad of aircraft, land-based missiles and nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs).
• Pakistan possessed approximately 170 nuclear warheads as of January 2023 — up from 165 from the previous year.

ABOUT SIPRI

• The SIPRI is an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament.
• Established in 1966 at Stockholm, Sweden, SIPRI provides data, analysis and recommendations, based on open sources, to policymakers, researchers, media and the interested public.