Global spending on nuclear weapons grew 13.4% last year to reach 91.4 billion dollars (about 85,382 million euros), more than half of them disbursed by the United States, according to the latest annual report of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

In a 2023 marked by the continuation of conflicts such as that in Ukraine and the outbreak of new ones such as the war in Gaza, the nine countries with confirmed atomic weapons (USA, China, Russia, United Kingdom, France, India, Israel, Pakistan and Korea from North) They invested an average of $173,884 per minute in this type of weaponry.

By country, the United States was the country that more money spent on nuclear arsenal ($51.5 billion) with a total of 5,044 nuclear weapons, well above China, the second in the ranking with 11.9 billion dollars and a much smaller arsenal (500 nuclear weapons).

Despite the large absolute figures in terms of investment by the United States and China, ICAN exposes that two other nuclear armed states, Russia and Israel, are responsible for the risk of the use of nuclear weapons being the highest since the Cold War, due to its involvement in the conflicts of Ukraine and Looprespectively.

Israel invested 1.1 billion dollars

Although there is no reliable information about his investment in nuclear weapons – given that the Israeli Government does not publicly confirm that it possesses atomic weapons – ICAN estimates that this dedicated around 5% of its military budget to nuclear weapons. According to this estimate, Israel was the seventh country that spent the most money last year on nuclear weapons ($1.1 billion).

According to ICAN, a coalition of organizations that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its activism against violence, Israel has about 90 nuclear weapons, which could be launched both through land-based missiles and from submarines or airplanes. It also significantly increased its military spending by 24% last year, mainly due to the large-scale offensive it has deployed in Gaza.

As for the rest of the nuclear-armed countries, Russia spent a total of $8.3 billion last year; the United Kingdom 8.1 billion; France 6.1 billion; India 2.7 billion; Pakistan 1 billion and North Korea 586 million. Five years of growth ICAN, which annually publishes its report on nuclear spending in the world, works to promote the adherence of all countries to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Thus, in the five years since the report has been published, annual spending on nuclear weapons has increased by 23.2 billion dollars, which represents an increase of 34% compared to 2019, the year before the beginning of this study. Specifically, the report estimates that States with confirmed atomic weapons spent a cumulative amount of $387 billion on their nuclear arsenals in the last five years.

According to researchers, this amount is 27 billion more than the total amount planned by the World Food Program (WFP) to end world hunger before 2030 ($360 billion). Furthermore, they warn that emerging technology, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), has the potential to increase the use of nuclear weapons due to the acceleration of the pace of wars and the reduction of decision-making time.

For this reason, ICAN insists that, despite the fact that some of the nuclear-armed States they still refuse to integrate AI in nuclear control due to the risks it represents, the only way to prevent the increase in the use of this type of weapons is by eliminating them.