India & Pakistan Expanding Nuclear Arsenal

Eight of the world’s nuclear pow­ers togeth­er pos­sessed near­ly 19,000 atom­ic weapons with India and Pak­istan expand­ing their capac­i­ties to pro­duce fis­sile mate­r­i­al for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es, a promi­nent Swedish think tank claimed today.

 -
 -
Here you can find more infor­ma­tion about: 

The world seems to be head­ing towards peace as the total mil­i­tary spend­ing mar­gin­al­ly increased by 0.3 per­cent in 2011–2012. The facts came to light in the year­book of Stock­holm Inter­na­tion­al Peace Research Insti­tiute (SIPRI).

The year­book stat­ed some inter­est­ing facts relat­ed to mil­i­tary spend­ing of nations of the world. As per the book, eight of the world pos­sessed near­ly 19,000 atom­ic weapons. 

India and Pak­istan have expand­ed their capac­i­ty to pro­duce fis­sile mate­r­i­al for mil­i­tary purpose. 

The world mil­i­tary spend­ing failed to rise for the first time since 1998 in a major shift from the inter­na­tion­al stand. The mil­i­tary expen­di­ture in 2011 was essen­tial­ly flat at USD 1.73 trillion. 

“India and Pak­istan con­tin­ue to devel­op new sys­tems capa­ble of deliv­er­ing nuclear weapons and are expand­ing their capac­i­ties to pro­duce fis­sile mate­r­i­al for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es,” it said. 

“The eight nuclear states the US, Rus­sia, the UK, France, Chi­na, India, Pak­istan and Israel togeth­er pos­sess a total of approx­i­mate­ly 19,000 nuclear weapons, as com­pared with 20,530 at the begin­ning of 2011,” it point­ed out. 

The decrease in the total num­ber of war­heads is main­ly due to Rus­sia and the US fur­ther reduc­ing their inven­to­ries of strate­gic nuclear weapons under the terms of the Treaty on Mea­sures for the Fur­ther Reduc­tion and Lim­i­ta­tion of Strate­gic Offen­sive Arms (New START) as well as retir­ing age­ing and obso­les­cent weapons, the think tank point­ed out. 

The main con­trib­u­tor to this down­ward trend is US and Rus­sia. Both the coun­tries have fur­ther reduced their inven­to­ries of strate­gic nuclear weapons under the terms of the Treaty on Mea­sures for the Fur­ther Reduc­tion and Lim­i­ta­tion of Strate­gic Offen­sive Arms (New START) as well as retir­ing age­ing and obso­les­cent weapons, the think tank point­ed out. 

At the same time, all five legal­ly recog­nised nuclear weapon states Chi­na, France, Rus­sia, the UK and the US are either deploy­ing new nuclear weapon deliv­ery sys­tems or have announced pro­grammes to do so, it added. 

They appear deter­mined to retain their nuclear arse­nals indefinitely. 

While the eight nuclear states pos­sessed approx­i­mate­ly 4400 oper­a­tional nuclear weapons at the start of 2012, near­ly 2000 of these are kept in a state of high oper­a­tional alert, the SIPRI report cautioned. 

The SIPRI year­book 2012 assess­es the cur­rent state of inter­na­tion­al secu­ri­ty, arma­ments and disarmament. 

SIPRI is an inde­pen­dent inter­na­tion­al insti­tute ded­i­cat­ed to research into con­flict, arma­ments, arms con­trol and disarmament. 

Source:
www.DefenceNews.in

The web­site is ded­i­cat­ed to give a com­plete, swift and day-to-day cov­er­age of all the lat­est hap­pen­ings in the world of Indi­an Defence and Aero­space in an accu­rate, objec­tive, cred­i­ble and com­pre­hen­sive manner. 

Team GlobDef

Seit 2001 ist GlobalDefence.net im Internet unterwegs, um mit eigenen Analysen, interessanten Kooperationen und umfassenden Informationen für einen spannenden Überblick der Weltlage zu sorgen. GlobalDefence.net war dabei die erste deutschsprachige Internetseite, die mit dem Schwerpunkt Sicherheitspolitik außerhalb von Hochschulen oder Instituten aufgetreten ist.

Alle Beiträge ansehen von Team GlobDef →