The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has identified a worrying trend in the situation of nuclear weapons in the world.

Although the total number of nuclear warheads continues to decline, the institute said in its annual report published on Monday, there are more deployable nuclear weapons than a year ago. The previous reduction of these deployable warheads seems to have stalled.

At the same time, extensive and expensive modernization programmes were under way.

In total, there were an estimated 13,080 nuclear weapons left on Earth at the beginning of 2021. That is 320 fewer than in the previous year and less than a fifth of what the nuclear powers had in their nuclear arsenals at the height of the Cold War in the mid-1980s.

The US and Russia still had more than 90 per cent of these weapons, with the rest distributed among China, France, Britain, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea.

However, the peace researchers consider the number of nuclear warheads that have already been mounted on missiles or that are located on active bases to be worrying.

These nuclear weapons are considered by SIPRI to be ready for deployment, and this number has risen from 3,720 to 3,825 compared to the previous year.

The US and Russia have each added around 50. Britain and France also have deployable warheads.