New Delhi / London: India enriched its nuclear arsenal by adding 10 more weapons to the stockpile over the last year, but the country possesses a fewer number of warheads than China and Pakistan, according to a report released by a leading Swedish think-tank on Monday.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) states in its report both India and China increased their nuclear arsenals in 2019. While China has a total of 320 warheads in its arsenal, Pakistan and India are estimated to have 160 and 150 weapons, respectively.
“China is in the middle of a significant modernisation of its nuclear arsenal. It is developing a so-called nuclear triad for the first time, made up of new land- and sea-based missiles and nuclear-capable aircraft,” the report warned.
“India and Pakistan are slowly increasing the size and diversity of their nuclear forces, while North Korea continues to prioritise its military nuclear programme as a central element of its national security strategy,” it said.
In its 2019 report, SIPRI had said China’s nuclear arsenal contained 290 warheads while India’s had 130-140. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was calculated at 150-160, a number which remains the same in this year’s assessment. Russia tops the table with 6,375 warheads, followed by the US with 5,800, and the UK with 215 warheads. The figures have been updated till January 2020.
The nuclear arsenals of the other N-armed states are considerably smaller but all these states are either developing or deploying new weapon systems or have announced their intention to do so, the report said.
“The nine nuclear-armed states — the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — together possessed an estimated 13,400 nuclear weapons at the start of 2020. This marked a decrease from the 13,865 nuclear weapons that SIPRI estimated these states possessed at the beginning of 2019. The decrease in the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world in 2019 was largely due to the dismantlement of retired nuclear weapons by Russia and the US — which together still possess over 90% of global nuclear weapons,” the report said.
