3.6.10

Pakistan has more N-warheads than India


After racing ahead of India in ballistic as well as cruise missiles, with covert help from China and North Korea, Pakistan seems to be surging ahead in the nuclear arsenal as well. A series of recent estimates by international nuclear watchdogs and reputed think-tanks hold that Pakistan has a total of 70 to 90 warheads to India’s 60 to 80. China, in comparison, has around 240 warheads. Even as global fears about the possibility of jihadis gaining access to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, enriched uranium or technical know-how continue, its deadly inventory is only going to expand in the coming years. Pakistan, after all, is supplementing its ongoing enriched uraniumbased nuke programme with a weapons-grade plutonium one. Its two new heavy-water reactors being built at its Khushab nuclear facility, with China’s help, are clearly geared towards producing weapons-grade plutonium. In its latest annual world military expenditure report released on Wednesday, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said Pakistan’s weapons-grade plutonium production would jump seven-fold with the two new reactors at Khushab nearing completion. “Our conservative estimates are that Pakistan has 60 warheads and could produce 100 nuclear weapons at short notice,’’ said SIPRI, adding that Islamabad had earmarked its US-supplied F-16 fighters, Ghaznavi and Shaheen missiles as its nuke delivery systems. India’s nuclear weapons programme, in turn, has largely been plutonium-based, basically centred around the Pu-239 produced in research reactors like Cirus and Dhruva at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. But the nuclear arsenals of India, Pakistan, and even China, pale in comparison to the gigantic ones of the two former Cold War foes—the US and Russia. SIPRI estimates there are a whopping 22,600 active, inactive and stored nuclear warheads around the globe, enough to destroy it several times over. While Russia has 12,000 warheads, 4,630 of them “deployed’’ ones, the US has 9,600, which includes 2,468 of them operational. The two, however, have recently decided to slash their inventories by nearly onethird. France comes third with 300, followed by the UK with 225. Israel which, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, completes the list of eight countries with nuclear weapons. It has an arsenal of 80 warheads. Then, there is also North Korea, which has produced “enough plutonium for a small number of warheads’’, SIPRI said. All these figures are not exact because countries keep their nuclear weapons programmes wellhidden behind thick cloaks of secrecy, which is only now being lifted by countries like the US and the UK.

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