Global nuclear arms spending up 11% in 2024, campaign group says

By Olivia Le Poidevin

GENEVA (Reuters) -Spending on nuclear weapons by the world's nine nuclear-armed nations rose by 11% in 2024, a report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons said on Friday.

The $10 billion annual increase to $100.2 billion went towards modernising and in some cases expanding nuclear arsenals, according to ICAN, a global civil society coalition that seeks the total elimination of atomic weapons.

"Nuclear-armed countries could have paid the United Nations' budget 28 times with what they spent to build and maintain nuclear weapons in 2024," the report said.

The U.S. recorded the largest annual increase in nuclear spending in 2024, rising by $5.3 billion, the report said. Its total expenditure of $56.8 billion exceeded the combined spending of all other nuclear-armed states, it said.

China spent $12.5 billion, followed by Britain at $10.4 billion, which was an increase of $2.2 billion, ICAN said.

It said the other nuclear-armed states were France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia.

“In terms of kind of the increase in spending in the UK and France, I think we certainly have seen, at least in the rhetoric of political leaders, a reference to the ongoing war in Ukraine, to the tensions, and that could be playing a role,” Alicia Sanders-Zakre, a policy and research coordinator at ICAN, told reporters at a briefing in Geneva.

Britain and other allies in NATO now regard Russia as the main security threat to Europe and some have rolled out plans to devote a higher percentage of GDP to defence spending.

However, Sanders-Zakre said the increase in nuclear expenditure has been more driven by the costs of servicing long-term contracts and the growing expense of developing nuclear delivery systems than by current security concerns.

(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin; editing by Friederike Heine and Mark Heinrich)