By Hans M. Kristensen
The Swedish International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) today published the 2013 issue of the SIPRI Yearbook. I’m coauthor of the chapter on worldwide nuclear weapons arsenals.
The yearbook is translated into Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian, providing a unique source of nuclear weapons information to regions where such information is either not available or only to English-speaking readers.
In addition to the annual SIPRI Yearbook, bimonthly updates of individual nuclear weapon states are published as Nuclear Notebooks in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Moreover, an online table of world nuclear forces is provided on the FAS web site. The table is updated as new information becomes available.
Finally, occasional issue reports are published on the FAS Strategic Security Blog.
This publication was made possible by grants from the New-Land Foundation and Ploughshares Fund. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
A military depot in central Belarus has recently been upgraded with additional security perimeters and an access point that indicate it could be intended for housing Russian nuclear warheads for Belarus’ Russia-supplied Iskander missile launchers.
The Indian government announced yesterday that it had conducted the first flight test of its Agni-5 ballistic missile “with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-Entry Vehicle (MIRV) technology.
While many are rightly concerned about Russia’s development of new nuclear-capable systems, fears of substantial nuclear increase may be overblown.
Despite modernization of Russian nuclear forces and warnings about an increase of especially shorter-range non-strategic warheads, we do not yet see such an increase as far as open sources indicate.