NATO countries are discussing putting their nuclear weapons on alert as part of a nuclear deterrent due to the threat from Russia and China, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview with The Telegraph.
Stoltenberg said: “I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”
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In his view, the alliance should send a “direct message” to its adversaries with its nuclear arsenal.
He warns that China is investing heavily in modern weapons, including a nuclear arsenal that he says will grow to a thousand warheads by 2030.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) annual review states that Russia and the United States together continue to possess almost 90 percent of all nuclear weapons in the world. The size of the countries’ arsenals has remained relatively stable, but in 2023 Russia deployed 36 more warheads in its operational forces than the year before, experts say.
Beijing is currently in the process of significantly modernizing and expanding its nuclear arsenal. China has increased its nuclear forces from 410 warheads in 2023 to 500 in 2024.
SIPRI experts suggest that China has for the first time deployed a small number of nuclear warheads (about 24) on its missiles, putting them on alert, which indicates that in the next 10 years the country will deploy as many intercontinental ballistic missiles as Russia or the United States.
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According to SIPRI experts, nuclear weapons have not played such a prominent role since the Cold War.
Last week, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that Russia has launched the second phase of tactical nuclear weapons exercises, this time with Belarus.
The exercises will focus on joint training of units of the Russian and Belarusian armed forces to deploy tactical nuclear weapons.
Non-strategic nuclear weapons, also known as tactical nuclear weapons, are designed for use on the battlefield.
Although these warheads have not yet been used in combat, they can be delivered via missiles, aircraft, or artillery. While they may not be as potentially devastating as strategic nuclear weapons, which can destroy entire cities, they still have the potential to be highly destructive, far more so than the two nuclear weapons used on cities in Japan at the end of World War II.
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