Russia has right to send nuclear arms to Crimea: Official

A senior Russian official says his country reserves the right to deploy nuclear arms in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which joined the Russian Federation last year.

“I don’t know if there are any nuclear weapons there at the moment and I am not aware of such plans, but in principle Russia can do this,” RIA Novosti news agency quoted the head of Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Weapons Control, Mikhail Ulyanov, as saying on Wednesday.

Moscow is naturally entitled to put nuclear weapons “in any region on its territory if it deems it necessary,” he stressed.

In January, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia Valery Gerasimov announced Moscow’s plan to reinforce its military presence on the Crimean Peninsula in 2015.

“In 2015, the Defense Ministry’s main efforts will focus on an increase of combat capabilities of the armed forces and increasing the military staff in accordance with military construction plans. Much attention will be given to the groupings in Crimea, Kaliningrad and the Arctic,” he said.

NATO military expansion

The comments came as NATO plans to expand its military presence in Eastern Europe amid the crisis in Ukraine.

The Western military alliance has held numerous war games over the past year. In 2014, NATO forces held some 200 military exercises, with the alliance’s General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg having promised that such drills would continue.

NATO launched a multinational naval drill in the Black Sea near the Crimean Peninsula on Tuesday. The war games involved NATO naval rapid reaction forces and saw the participation of the USS Vicksburg, a US guided missile cruiser, as well as vessels from six other participating states – Canada, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey.

Moscow has repeatedly condemned NATO’s exercises and military buildup toward its borders.

The Moscow-West relations sharply cooled after the Crimea joined Russia following a referendum in March 2014. Relations were strained further after Ukraine launched military operations in mid-April 2014 to silence pro-Russia protests in the country’s mainly Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine.

Pakistan Has More Nukes Than India, Shows New Infographic

Pakistan had about 120 atomic weapons, 10 more than India, in its nuclear arsenal in 2014, according to a new interactive infographic unveiled by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

 

Designed by the Bulletin, founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the infographic tracks the number and history of nuclear weapons in the nine nuclear weapon states.

The Nuclear Notebook Interactive Infographic provides a visual representation of the Bulletin's famed Nuclear Notebook, which since 1987 has tracked the number and type of the world's nuclear arsenals.

Having reached a peak of over 65,000 in the late 1980s, the number of nuclear warheads has dropped significantly to a little over 10,000, but more countries now possess them, it shows.

According to the infographic, the United States and Russia both have about 5,000 weapons each.

France has 300, China 250, the United Kingdom 225 and Israel 80. North Korea has only conducted nuclear tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013.

"I don't think people truly understand just how many of these weapons there are in the world," said Rachel Bronson, executive director of the Bulletin.

"The Interactive is a way to see, immediately, who has nuclear weapons and when they got them, and how those numbers relate to each other. It is a startling experience, looking at those comparisons."

The authors of the Nuclear Notebook are Hans M Kristensen and Robert S Norris, both with the Federation of American Scientists.

In the most recent edition of the Nuclear Notebook, the authors discuss the Notebook's 28 year history and describe how sometimes host countries learned of foreign nuclear weapons on their soil from the Nuclear Notebook.

Over 28 years of weapons analysis, the Nuclear Notebook column has revealed surprise nuclear activity and spot-on arsenal estimates while becoming a daily resource for scholars, activists and journalists.

"We wanted a way to communicate those numbers visually, because the world we live may be data-driven, it's also visual," said John Mecklin, editor of the Bulletin.

"The new infographic makes this vital information even more accessible." 

 

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