Fredrik Dahl and Lennart Simonsson report for Haaretz:
‘Nuclear-armed states are modernizing their arsenals and appear determined to keep sizable numbers of such weapons of mass destruction for the foreseeable future, the SIPRI think-tank said in its annual report on Monday. Five years after U.S. President Barack Obama set out a vision of a world without nuclear weapons, the findings by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute made clear just how distant that goal remains. While there has been a steady decline in the number of nuclear warheads in the world over the past five years, nine countries still had a total of 16,300 such weapons in early 2014 – down by 970, or 5.6 percent from the previous year – of which some 4,000 were operational. And the pace of reductions seems to be slowing compared with a decade ago, the Swedish think-tank said. “Once again this year, the nuclear weapon-possessing states took little action to indicate a genuine willingness to work toward complete dismantlement of their nuclear arsenals,” wrote SIPRI researchers Shannon Kile and Phillip Patton Schell.’
- ‘Pakistan, India, China expanding nuclear arsenals’
- Israel has 80 of the world’s 16,300 nuclear warheads
Filed under: Nuclear Weapons
