SIPRI estimates that China now has at least 600 nuclear warheads.

"By January 2025, China had completed or was close to completing around 350 new ICBM silos in three large desert fields in the north of the country and three mountainous areas in the east," SIPRI said.

Depending on how it decides to structure its forces, China could potentially have at least as many ICBMs as either Russia or the USA by the turn of the decade.

"Yet even if China reaches the maximum projected number of 1500 warheads by 2035, that will still amount to only about one third of each of the current Russian and US nuclear stockpiles," it said.

SIPRI said that of the total global inventory of an estimated 12 241 warheads in January 2025, about 9614 were in military stockpiles for potential use.

An estimated 3912 of those warheads were deployed with missiles and aircraft and the rest were in central storage.

Around 2100 of the deployed warheads were kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles.

Nearly all of these warheads belonged to Russia or the USA, but China may now keep some warheads on missiles during peacetime.

"The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world, which had lasted since the end of the cold war, is coming to an end," said Hans M. Kristensen, Associate Senior Fellow with SIPRI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme and Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

"Instead, we see a clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric and the abandonment of arms control agreements," Hans M. Kristensen said.