The Growing Nuclear Arsenals
and Sharpened Rhetoric
Alice Slater / In Depth News
(June 21, 2025) — The recent report from the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), despite its assertion that “understanding the conditions for peaceful solutions to international conflicts is a key part of their work”, has just issued alarming news that there is a “clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric and the abandonment of arms controls agreements!
The report then goes on to count the many ways that nuclear arsenals are expanding and new and more lethal technology is being developed in a growing number of nuclear weapons states and nuclear wannabe weapons states, bemoaning the “abandonment of arms control agreements”.
But it is precisely because these arms “controllers” never advocate for nuclear elimination, abolition, or disarmament and fail to promote the many missed opportunities to achieve an end to the bomb while repeatedly proposing step-by-step measures for an infinite number of various controls on arsenals, that we never get to see the end to nuclear weapons.
Indeed, scholars writing of the repeated proposals for insufficient steps have nowhere coined a term for these meaningless measures—antipreneurism—the action was taken for only illusory progress in finally banning the bomb.
Since SIPRI correctly notes that it is the US and Russia who have 90% of the total 2025 global inventory of some 12,241 warheads on the planet, it is really up to those countries to make the first move.
The US has rejected many opportunities over the years, starting from the very beginning of the nuclear age when Stalin proposed to Truman that the US put its new and terrifying nuclear weapons under the control of the newly formed United Nations, devoted to “ending the scourge of war” with its first resolution calling for nuclear disarmament. Truman refused, and Russia got the bomb!
The US walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 — which it had negotiated with the USSR — and put new missile bases in Romania and Poland.
Russia and China repeatedly urge the US to move forward on nuclear abolition; they need to preserve their “strategic security”, which would require the US to enter into treaties to ban weapons in space and cyber war. The US refuses to support those treaties and has vetoed negotiating proposals for draft treaties tabled by Russia and China in the consensus-bound UN Committee on Disarmament in Geneva.
When Gorbachev dissolved the Warsaw Pact and freed all of occupied Eastern Europe, he proposed to Reagan that the countries could eliminate their nuclear arsenals provided the US would end its Star Wars program to dominate and control the military use of space.
The US refused, and Gorbachev withdrew his offer. He was also very concerned that a united Germany would be a member of NATO since the USSR lost 27 million people to the Nazi onslaught.
The US assured Gorbachev and Yeltsin that we would not expand NATO one inch to the east. Still, Clinton began the expansion with the annexation of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; Albania, Croatia, Montenegro. and North Macedonia between 2009 and 2917, and most recently, Sweden and Finland during the Ukraine War.
The US keeps nuclear weapons in five NATO states: Turkey, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Belgium. Russia recently placed its nuclear weapons in Belarus during the Ukraine War. Indeed, some kind of deal should be urged to remove the US weapons in Europe in return for Russia taking its newly placed nuclear weapons out of Belarus.
A Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is launched from Plesetsk in Russia’s northwest. (Roscosmos Space Agency Press Service via AP, File)
Despite SIPRI’s assertion that its mission includes “understanding the conditions for peaceful solutions to international conflicts is a key part of their work”, history shows that there have been many possible solutions to genuine nuclear disarmament and abolition, repeatedly rejected by the US in the awful grip of what has now been described as the MICIMATT—the Military, Industrial, Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academic Think Tank complex!
Perhaps a more thorough and emphatic discussion and understanding of all the possible solutions over the years by SIPRI would enable more progress than the meaningless steps to “arms control” that are constantly being promoted and have brought us to this burgeoning new arms race today!
Alice Slater serves on the Board of World BEYOND War and is a UN Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. [IDN-InDepthNews]
