China pursuing ‘significant’ expansion of nuclear arsenal, report says

China is in the midst of a “significant” expansion of its nuclear capabilities and may have as many intercontinental ballistic missiles as the United States or Russia by 2030, according to a new global analysis of nuclear weapons.

Beijing is both growing and modernizing its nuclear arsenal, according to an annual report released Sunday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a group that tracks global security and arms control. China’s military stockpile grew from 410 nuclear warheads last year to 500 as of January, the report found.

The expansion of China’s capabilities came as SIPRI warned that even as the total number of nuclear warheads around the world was declining as Cold War-era weapons were phased out, there were steady year-on-year increases in the number of operational warheads that could be used quickly in the event of conflict.

About 2,100 deployed nuclear warheads are being kept in a state of “high operational alert” on ballistic missiles — and while almost all belong to Russia or the United States, China is believed to have placed some warheads on this level of alert for the first time, SIPRI found.

Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists nonprofit group and an associate senior fellow with SIPRI, said in a statement that China was “expanding its nuclear arsenal faster than any other country” but added that “in nearly all of the nuclear-armed states there are either plans or a significant push to increase nuclear forces.”

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