There are 9 nuclear-armed states on this planet and practically all of them continued with intensive nuclear modernization applications in 2024, upgrading current weapons and including newer variations.
That is without doubt one of the key findings of the Stockholm Worldwide Peace Analysis Institute’s (SIPRI) Yearbook 2025, an annual evaluation of the state of armaments, disarmament and worldwide safety.
Within the mid-Eighties, nuclear warheads, bombs and shells worldwide numbered round 64,000. At the moment, the determine stands at an estimated 12,241. That pattern now appears set to be reversed, based on the newest evaluation.
“Essentially the most worrying single factor that we see within the nuclear arsenals in the mean time is that the long-term discount within the numbers of nuclear warheads is coming to an finish,” SIPRI Director Dan Smith advised DW.
The top of post-Chilly Battle nuclear disarmament
Because the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the top of the Cold War, the dismantling of retired warheads — warheads faraway from the nuclear stockpile — has outpaced the deployment of recent ones.
Whereas it’s common follow for nuclear-armed states to modernize and improve their nuclear capabilities, Smith says there was an intensification of this course of since late in former US President Barack Obama’s closing time period, with extra funding in new generations of missiles and carriers.
“Already for a number of years earlier than then, the safety horizon worldwide had been darkening and the nuclear-armed states have been already beginning to introduce these processes of what we’d name this ‘intense’ strategy of modernization, so not just a bit little bit of tinkering, however some actual steep modifications,” Smith mentioned.
SIPRI researchers conclude that of the world’s estimated 12,241 nuclear warheads in January 2025, about 9,614 have been in army stockpiles: both positioned on missiles or positioned on bases with operational forces, or in central storage that would doubtlessly be deployed.
An estimated 3,912 of these warheads have been deployed with missiles and plane, with round 2,100 of these saved in a state of excessive operational alert on ballistic missiles. Almost all of these belonged to Russia or the US, however China might also now hold some warheads on missiles, based on the evaluation.
Among the many world’s nuclear-armed states — the USA, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel — Russia and the US possess 90% of all nuclear weapons.
SIPRI analysts now warn that increasingly states are contemplating creating or internet hosting nuclear weapons, with revitalized nationwide debates about nuclear standing and technique.
This consists of new nuclear sharing preparations: Russia claims to have deployed nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory, whereas a number of European NATO member states have signaled willingness to host US nuclear weapons.
Worldwide safety deteriorating for over a decade
In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference wherein he railed in opposition to the US-dominated world order, NATO’s eastward growth and disarmament.
However simply two years later in 2009, Obama announced the goal of total nuclear disarmament in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. “The existence of hundreds of nuclear weapons is probably the most harmful legacy of the Chilly Battle,” he mentioned.
He went on to say that the US would “take concrete steps in direction of a world with out nuclear weapons” and negotiate a brand new Strategic Arms Discount Treaty (New START) with Russia. That treaty was signed, and got here into power in 2011.
However within the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration revealed its 2022 Nuclear Posture Assessment which recognized the modernization of the US nuclear arsenal as a prime precedence.
In February 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a invoice halting Russia’s participation within the New START treaty.
“The tide of insecurity has been constructing slowly since 2007-08, by 2014, onto this second when the waves begin crashing down in February 2022,” Smith mentioned. “I believe that’s when perhaps many odd residents woke as much as this deterioration which was greater than a decade outdated by that point.”
The underside line is: the world’s nuclear arsenals are being enlarged and upgraded. SIPRI estimates that China now has not less than 600 nuclear warheads and that its nuclear arsenal is rising quicker than every other nation’s.
India can also be believed to have barely expanded its nuclear arsenal in 2024, whereas Pakistan continued to develop new delivery systems and accumulate fissile material — a key element of nuclear weapons.
Israel, which on June 13 launched strikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, killing military leaders and nuclear scientists, maintains a coverage of deliberate ambiguity over its personal nuclear capabilities. Nonetheless, it’s believed to be within the strategy of modernizing its personal nuclear arsenal, in addition to upgrading a plutonium manufacturing reactor website within the Negev desert.
AI and house applied sciences up the specter of nuclear struggle
In his introduction to the SIPRI Yearbook 2025, Smith warns of the prospect of a brand new nuclear arms race that carries “rather more danger and uncertainty” than in the course of the Chilly Battle period — largely because of the rise of artificial intelligence and new applied sciences within the fields of cyber capabilities and house property.
“The approaching nuclear arms race goes to be as a lot about AI, our on-line world and outer house as it’s about missiles in bunkers or on submarines or bombs on aircrafts. It is going to be as a lot concerning the software program as concerning the {hardware},” Smith mentioned.
This complicates the query of the way to management and monitor nuclear weapons and stockpiles when the competitors between nuclear-armed states was once kind of about numbers.
There are long-term discussions about AI in relation to what are generally referred to as “killer robots” (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems), and the usage of automated and semi-automated drones since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — however not a lot in relation to nuclear weapons.
Synthetic intelligence permits for a considerable amount of info to be processed extraordinarily rapidly and in concept this could assist determination makers to react extra rapidly. Nonetheless, if one thing goes improper throughout the software program or a system completely reliant on LLMs, machine studying and AI, a small technical glitch may doubtlessly result in a nuclear strike.
“I believe there needs to be a purple line that most likely all political leaders and army leaders may even agree with, that the choice on nuclear launch can’t be made by synthetic intelligence,” Smith mentioned, pointing to the example of Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov.
In 1983, Petrov was on responsibility on the Soviet nuclear early-warning system command heart 62 miles south of Moscow when the system reported the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile from the US, with 4 extra behind it.
Fortunately, Petrov suspected the warning was a false alarm and waited as a substitute of relaying the knowledge instantly up the chain of command — a choice which possible prevented a retaliatory nuclear strike, and within the worst-case state of affairs, full-scale nuclear struggle.
“I suppose the large query is that in a world of synthetic intelligence, who performs the a part of Lieutenant Colonel Petrov?” Smith requested.
