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World military spending failed to rise last year for the first timesince 1998 in what could herald a major trend break, but the globalnuclear threat remains strong, think tank SIPRI said Monday. As the global economic crisis cuts into defence spending, conflictsaround the world are also becoming smaller, shorter and lessdeadly, and the number of wars between states are at historicallylow levels, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institutesaid. The Arab Spring also demonstrated that new types of conflicts areemerging, it added. World military expenditure in 2011 was essentially flat at $1.73trillion (1.4 trillion euros) -- an increase of just 0.3 percentfrom 2010 -- representing 2.5 percent of global gross domesticproduct or $249 per person, SIPRI said in a report. "However, it is still too early to say whether this means thatworld military expenditure has finally peaked," the think tankwrote. Nuclear arsenals declined last year, the report said, as the UnitedStates and Russia further reduced their inventories of strategicnuclear weapons. At the start of 2012, eight countries -- Britain, China, India,Israel, France, Pakistan, Russia and the United States -- held some19,000 nuclear warheads, compared to 20,530 at the start of 2011,it said. However, long-term modernisation programmes under way in nuclearstates "suggest that nuclear weapons are still a currency ofinternational status and power," SIPRI researcher Shannon Kilesaid. "In spite of the world's revived interest in disarmament efforts,none of the nuclear weapon-possessing states show more than arhetorical willingness to give up their nuclear arsenals just yet,"he said. The report noted that Iran and Syria came under intensifiedscrutiny in 2011 for allegedly concealing military nuclearactivities. "The unresolved Iranian and Syrian nuclear controversies raisedfurther doubt about the efficacy of international legal approaches,in particular the role of the UN Security Council, in dealing withsuspected or known cases of states violating important arms controltreaty obligations and norms." In Iran, "the main question now is whether the current negotiationsbetween Iran and the P5+1 states (UN Security Council membersBritain, China, France, Russia and the US plus Germany) will yieldconcrete results," Kile told AFP. "The prospects for reaching a negotiated settlement remain unclear,with both sides engaged in political gamesmanship," he added. As for Syria, international concern about its alleged undeclarednuclear activities has been "completely overshadowed" by the publicuprising in the country and the Security Council "has shown nowillingness" to take up the matter, he said. Meanwhile, SIPRI said North Korea was believed to have separatedroughly 30 kilos (66 pounds) of plutonium, enough to build up toeight nuclear weapons "depending on North Korea's design andengineering skills." According to a leaked report prepared in 2011 by the SecurityCouncil, the country has pursued a uranium-enrichment programme forseveral years or even decades, but "it is not known whether NorthKorea has produced highly-enriched uranium for use in nuclearweapons," SIPRI said. The institute also noted that civil wars in developing countrieswere now the main form of conflict worldwide. "We have witnessed the practical disappearance of wars betweenstates -- with numbers at a historically low level," armed conflictresearcher Neil Melvin told AFP. Nowadays, "violence emerges within states, escalating frompolitical opposition to civil wars," as in Libya and "it seems weare reaching that point with Syria," Melvin said. Finally, the think tank said the Arab Spring demonstrated thegrowing complexity of armed conflict. "The events of last year were not isolated in terms of contemporaryconflict trends," Melvin explained, saying they "echoed changesthat have been occurring in armed conflict for decades." "Taken together, these changes suggest there's a new kind ofconflict environment emerging, one in which internationalinterventions become far more difficult to carry out," he said. SIPRI, which specialises in research on conflicts, weapons, armscontrol and disarmament, was created in 1966 and is 50-percentfinanced by the Swedish state. I am an expert from cellphone-replacement-parts.com, while we provides the quality product, such as China Cellphone Replacement Parts , IPod Flex Cable, Apple IPod Spare Parts,and more.
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