24/06/2024
Nuclear arms spending soars as global tensions swell: studies
Nuclear-armed countries hiked spending on atomic weapons arsenals by a third in the past five years as they modernised their stockpiles amid growing geopolitical tensions, two reports showed on Monday.
The world’s nine nuclear-armed states jointly spent $91 billion on their arsenals last year, according to a new report from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
That report, and a separate one from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), indicated that nuclear weapons states are dramatically scaling up spending as they modernise and even deploy new nuclear-armed weapons.
The spending surge reported by ICAN appeared to back that up.
The report showed that in 2023 alone, nuclear weapons spending worldwide jumped by $10.8 billion from a year earlier, with the United States accounting for 80 percent of that increase.
The US share of total spending, $51.5 billion, “is more than all the other nuclear-armed countries put together”, said ICAN.
The next biggest spender was China, at $11.8 billion, followed by Russia, spending $8.3 billion.
Britain’s spending meanwhile rose significantly for the second year in a row, swelling 17 percent to $8.1 billion.
Spending for 2023 by the nuclear-armed states — which also include France, India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea — jumped more than 33 percent from the $68.2 billion spent in 2018, when ICAN first began collecting this data, it said.
Since then, the nuclear armed states have spent an estimated total of $387 billion on the deadly weapons, the report showed.
Source: Insiderpaper
