China and Pakistan have more Nuclear weapons than India: Report

Asian powerhouses India and China have expanded their nuclear arsenal in the last one year, but the stockpile of the third Asian nuke nation, Pakistan remains more or less the same, says a new report from a European think-tank on disarmament.

Both China and Pakistan have more N-weapons than India.

India is estimated to have 150 N-weapons (as against 130-140 estimated last year) whereas Pakistan has 160 such weapons (150-160 estimated last year), according to the report published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on Monday.

China on the other hand has augmented its N-weapon reserve by adding 30 more warheads from last year's estimate of 290 such weapons.

The Chinese increase is due to the fact that it is in the middle of a significant modernisation of its nuclear arsenal.

The communist country is developing a so-called nuclear triad for the first time, made up of new land- and sea-based missiles and nuclear-capable aircraft.

India and Pakistan too are slowly increasing the size and diversity of their nuclear forces.

Globally the nine nuclear-armed states — the USA, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — together possessed an estimated 13,400 nuclear weapons at the start of 2020.

This marked a decrease from the 13,865 nuclear weapons that SIPRI estimated these states possessed at the beginning of 2019.

The fissile raw material for nuclear weapons is either highly enriched uranium or separated plutonium.

China, France, Russia, the UK and the USA produce both HEU and plutonium for use in their nuclear weapons whereas India and Israel use mainly plutonium.

Pakistan primarily relies on the HEU but has begun to increase its ability to produce plutonium, says the SIPRI report.

On conventional weapons, India remains the world's second largest importer. The five largest arms importers were Saudi Arabia, India, Egypt, Australia and China, which together accounted for 36 per cent of the world's total arms imports

With a spending of more than $71 billion, India became the third biggest spender on the military after the USA ($ 732 billion) and China ($ 261 billion) in 2019. Saudi Arabia fell to the fifth position from the third slot it occupied in 2018.