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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has raised nuclear risk by suggesting the nuclear-armed alliance could increase the number of nuclear weapons it has operationally available. It comes as two new reports show a surge in spending on nuclear weapons and an increase in the types of nuclear weapons being developed.
Speaking to the Telegraph newspaper, Stoltenberg said members were already having discussions on NATO’s nuclear posture:
“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 at NATO, for instance at meetings in NATO, a nuclear planning group as we had during the defence ministerial meeting this [last] week.”
Stoltenberg also suggested that transparency would be a bedrock of NATO nuclear policy:
“Transparency helps to communicate the direct message that we, of course, are a nuclear alliance.
“NATO’s aim is, of course, a world without nuclear weapons, but as long as nuclear weapons exist, we will remain a nuclear alliance, because a world where Russia, China and North Korea have nuclear weapons, and NATO does not, is a more dangerous world.”
Despite the NATO boss’s suggestion that nuclear disarmament was a goal of the alliance, new reports published this week highlight how nuclear powers are doing the opposite.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons’ (ICAN) “Surge: 2023 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending” report, published on Monday, found that spending on nuclear weapons increased by 34% in the past five years, from $68.2 billion to $91.4 billion annually, with a cumulative total of $387 billion during this period.
On the same, day, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its annual assessment of the state of armaments, disarmament and international security. It warned that nuclear-armed states “continued to modernize their nuclear arsenals and several deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapon systems in 2023.”
It also warned that there had been a worrying decline in “transparency regarding nuclear forces” between the US and Russia since the latter’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and that “debates around nuclear-sharing arrangements have increased in saliency.” Together the two countries possess almost 90 percent of all nuclear weapons.
CND General Secretary Kate Hudson said:
“Stoltenberg’s suggestion that NATO makes more of its nuclear weapons operationally available is a further step towards nuclear war. This latest NATO insanity must be opposed.
“And his claim that NATO aims for a world free from nuclear weapons is plain laughable. As ICAN’s report makes shows, Britain’s spending on nuclear weapons has increased by over 43% in the last five years. In 2023 alone, Britain spent a staggering £6.5 billion on nuclear weapons, up 17.1% on the previous year. This positions Britain as the fourth-highest spender on nuclear weapons globally, just behind Russia, and marks the second-largest increase in spending after the United States – which spent more than all the other nuclear-armed states combined.
“Stoltenberg needs to stop ratcheting up the nuclear risk – he’s taking us all down an exceptionally dangerous route.”
Image credit: NATO / Flickr
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