Earlier this year, the Doomsday Clock indicated that the world is just 90 seconds away from annihilation. A recent report highlights why we are closer to Armageddon than ever before: over the past five years, nuclear-armed countries have increased spending on their atomic weapons arsenals by a third.
According to a new report from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the world’s nine nuclear-armed states collectively spent $91 billion on their arsenals last year. This report, along with another from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), reveals that nuclear-armed countries are significantly ramping up spending as they modernize and deploy new nuclear weapons.
SIPRI’s report noted that the total estimated number of nuclear warheads globally actually decreased slightly to 12,121 at the start of this year, down from 12,512 the previous year. Nearly all of these warheads are held by the United States and Russia, but for the first time, China is believed to have some warheads on high operational alert.
In 2023 alone, global nuclear weapons spending increased by $10.8 billion compared to the previous year, with the United States accounting for 80 percent of that increase. The US share of total spending amounted to $51.5 billion, which is more than all other nuclear-armed countries combined. The next biggest spender was China, at $11.8 billion, followed by Russia, at $8.3 billion. Britain’s spending also rose significantly for the second consecutive year, increasing by 17 percent to $8.1 billion.
Spending 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.
