“How easy is it to talk about peace and disarmament today when the world is busy rearming?” That’s the question that Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s biggest selling daily paper, asked itself, its readers and me in a recent article. About me, it said, “SIPRI’s director says he is a born optimist, but when DN meets him, he describes the world in black and dark grey.” And yet at the end, the reporter, Ewa Stenberg, managed to find some light amid the dark. NOTE: This post relays some of the points in the interview with me in Dagens Nyheter on 6 January. It’s my translation, courtesy of google translate ..read more

On 21 February, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would suspend its participation in New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the world’s two nuclear superpowers: Russia and the United States. This is a disappointing, unimaginative but unsurprising step from which nobody benefits. And from which we all may lose. Including Russia. New START The full and formal title of New START is the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. It was signed by Russia and the USA in Prague on 8 April 2010 (so it’s s ..read more

I hope my levity does not make it seem as if I am dismissing the human reality of the horrors we have witnessed in 2022 or downplaying the seriousness of the events and their implications. But it is the way I express my assessment of the year in a brief interview filmed and disseminated as part of SIPRI’s Peace Points series. It has been a year of war, crisis, the impact of climate change, growing hunger in poorer countries, and increased cost of living everywhere – rich and poor countries alike. And it came on the back of three years of pandemic for most of the world and a fourth year for Chi ..read more

On 8 May last year, US President Trump announced that the United States would pull out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which sets limits on Iran’s nuclear programme to ensure that it cannot produce nuclear weapons. Despite the US withdrawal, the JCPOA remains in force. Today, however, Iranian state TV reported that, while remaining in the JCPOA, Iran is planning to resume some nuclear activities that were ceased under the agreement. The JCPOA is a multilateral agreement to which seven of the original eight parties still adhere. When they arrived at the agreement in Jul ..read more

Even before President Trump announced the USA would withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987 (see my last blog post on this), the arms control landscape did not present a happy picture. Experts from SIPRI and from the Russian Institute, IMEMO, met in October and discussed the problem. The occasion marked the 25th anniversary of the SIPRI Yearbook being published in Russian, thanks to translation effected through IMEMO, together with a Russian supplement produced by IMEMO. We captured some of the key themes in this short film in SIPRI’s Spotlight series ..read more

Nagasaki was destroyed on 9 August 1945. It was three days after the Little Boy bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Made of uranium and nicknamed Little Boy, it killed at least 80,000 people with its immediate effects of blast, fire and radioactivity. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki was named Fatman, was made of plutonium and killed some 40,000 people immediately. Many analysts and commentators believe that, today, the risk of nuclear war is greater than it has ever been, even at the height of the Cold War. Quantifying and comparing risk is a complex business and comparisons are hard to make between d ..read more

On 3 January, the leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the UK and the USA, the P5) jointly stated that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. So say we all, I hope. But what does it mean for the P5 to say this, and to say it now? The P5’s statement echoed the declaration by President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at their Geneva summit meeting in 1985, which was followed by historic talks on nuclear disarmament. The new statement is unlikely to have such an impact. The ..read more

The extension of the US-Russian New START agreement on strategic nuclear weapons was achieved through the exchange of two sets of diplomatic notes between the respective governments, on 26 January and 3 February. The process was super-straightforward. Both President Putin of Russia and Joe Biden while US President-elect made clear they would each favour extension. The day after inauguration President Biden officially confirmed the position. A few days later, it was done. This was the lowest of low-hanging fruit. Good to have gotten it out of the way (and stupid that the previous administration ..read more

So Joe Biden, as anticipated, has moved quickly to arrange with Russia the extension of the New START bilateral nuclear arms control agreement. Signed in 2010, taking effect in 2011, and due to expire on 5 February this year, the treaty permits extension for up to five years by mutual consent. The good people at Deutsche Welle asked me the two key questions – “Is this good news?” “Why”? And let me answer them on their 8 o’clock bulletin yesterday evening. For a more extended discussion, Jan Eliasson and I put out our thoughts earlier this week. In brief, as I argued in my previous post, in a ..read more

The SIPRI Yearbook 2019 is now available on line. It registers key data in the world of peace and security in 2018 and establishes some of the basic indicators that let us track and assess the trends. It is not a comfortable picture. You can get a quick take on it from my shorthand overview below and/or from the latest short film in our Peace Points series. Good news amid the bad Bluntly put, the trend of recent years has been pretty negative. It’s not uniformly awful; it never is. In 2018, there was a new détente on the Korean peninsula and the opening of talks between the USA and North Kore ..read more