Three countries that are considered the world's largest nuclear powers-China, India and Pakistan-have been working to steadily increase their cache of weaponry, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute told France 24 on Monday.
Pakistan has upped its number of warheads by around 10, bringing the arsenal to between 100 and 120. India also added about 10 warheads, for a total of 90 to 110. At the moment, China has 250 nuclear warheads, up 10 from last year.
According to SIPRI, the acquisition of nuclear weaponry is a precarious move, especially for what they call a "fragile" situation in Asia, where tensions between India, Pakistan, China, Japan and the two Koreas have been steadily rising since 2008.
"While states have avoided direct conflict with each other and have stopped supporting insurgent movements on each other's territory, decades-old suspicions linger and economic integration has not been followed up with political integration," SIPRI said in its annual report.
According to the Agence France Presse, Russia and the United States have scaled back on their number of warheads-Moscow now has 8,500, down from 10,000 and the U.S. has slimmed down from 8,000 to 7,700.
Israel stayed at 80, as did France at 300. Britain's warhead number also remained constant at 225.
SIPRI did acknowledge the fact that these numbers were estimates, as many countries are not entirely honest and transparent about their nuclear storehouses.
But countries, it seems, have no plans to get rid of their entire defense caches, SIPRI reported. The U.S. and Russia did not destroy all their chemical weapons as they promised in 2012.
"Once again there was little to inspire hope that the nuclear weapon-possessing states are genuinely willing to give up their nuclear arsenals," SIPRI Senior Researcher Shannon Kile told AFP. "The long-term modernization programs under way in these states suggest that nuclear weapons are still a marker of international status and power."
SIPRI has been an advocate of getting rid of nuclear weapons for years.
