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World nuclear forces

North Korea possessed an estimated 10 to 20 nuclear warheads as of Jan. 2017, Sweden’s Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported on July 3.

“North Korea appears to have made technical progress in its military nuclear and ballistic missile programmes,” SPIRI wrote in an annual global arms reduction report published that day.

In its report last year, the institute estimated the maximum number of North Korean nuclear warheads at ten - meaning its estimate has doubled in the space of one year.

“North Korea continues to prioritize its military nuclear and ballistic missile programmes,” the report noted.

“North Korea is believed to have prioritized developing a long-range ballistic missile that can deliver a nuclear warhead to mainland USA,” it said elsewhere.

But the report also said there was “no publicly available evidence to confirm . . . that it has built a nuclear warhead that is sufficiently compact to be delivered by a ballistic missile.”

SIPRI reported that the total number of nuclear warheads in the nine countries that possessed nuclear weapons as of Jan. 2017 stood at 14,935, down from 15,395 in 2016.

But that decline was attributable to reductions in the US and Russia, which account for around 93% of nuclear weapons worldwide, with almost no change in the number of warheads for the other seven countries. The nine countries listed by the institute as having nuclear weapons were the US, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.

By Yi Yong-in, Washington correspondent

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