Nuclear-armed states are modernizing their arsenals and appear determined to keep sizable numbers of such weapons of mass destruction for the foreseeable future, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said Monday in its annual report.
Five years after U.S. President Barack Obama set out a vision of a world without nuclear weapons, the findings by a leading think tank made clear just how distant that goal remains.
While there has been a steady decline in the number of nuclear warheads in the world over the past five years, nine countries still held a total of 16,300 such weapons in early 2014 — down by around 5.6 percent from the previous year — of which around 4,000 were operational.