During one of the latest large artillery offensives against Ukrainian territory, on May 24, Russia used two Oreshnik missiles. Throughout the night and at dawn, Moscow launched more than 600 drones and 90 missiles against the capital, Kyiv. Four people were killed and around 100 were wounded. The intermediate-range Oreshniks struck Bila Tserkva, a town south of Kyiv, and the outskirts of the city of Donetsk, territory occupied by Russian forces in the Donbas region in the country’s east. The latter fell there by mistake. Moscow missed its target with a very powerful, hypersonic weapon that is almost impossible to intercept. The warhead was conventional, but this model can carry a nuclear payload. Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged last Thursday from Saint Petersburg that the projectile that was lost was “experimental.”

A test, according to the Kremlin’s version, of a missile with great destructive potential that the Russian military has already used on four occasions, always as a conventional weapon, against neighboring Ukraine. The Oreshnik is one of the examples included in the report published on Monday about nuclear arsenals by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The research center says the nine nuclear-armed states (the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea) “modernized and improved” their arsenals over the past year, deploying new systems to deliver atomic munitions or systems capable of doing so.

Among these advances are the Oreshnik on the Russian side, but also, on the U.S. side, the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental missile, the Columbia-class nuclear-powered submarine, and the B-21 Raider heavy bomber. These are only some of the new capabilities for delivering atomic munitions driving the new nuclear arms race.

One of the warnings sounded in the report is the following: nearly four decades after the end of the Cold War, states are again relying on nuclear weapons as instruments of power. And that is despite efforts to reduce the role of such armaments. The need to display atomic muscle to deter adversaries is growing, which increases the risks of miscalculation and escalation at a time when the number of conflicts in the world is rising — the current total is 49 — most of them internal.

During the past year there were six interstate wars: Afghanistan–Pakistan; India–Pakistan; Iran–Israel/United States; Russia–Ukraine; Cambodia–Thailand; and the Democratic Republic of the Congo–Rwanda. Only in the latter two did a nuclear-armed actor not participate.

According to SIPRI’s inventory, completed in January 2026, there are 12,187 nuclear warheads in the world, around 9,745 in military stockpiles for possible use, about 130 more than a year earlier. Of the total, an estimated 4,012 are deployed on missiles, aircraft or in storage — Russia and the United States have over 1,700 each — about 100 more than in January 2025. Between 2,100 and 2,200, mostly Russian and American, are in a state of highest operational alert for immediate use via ballistic missiles.

Despite this, the total number of nuclear warheads continues to decline thanks to the dismantlement processes — faster than production — of those removed from Russian and U.S. arsenals under agreements reached after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Stockholm research center warns that this trend could reverse in the current context. “There is increasing evidence that nuclear-armed states are setting aside, and even abandoning, their disarmament commitments and, instead, are flaunting their nuclear power,” says Hans M. Kristensen, a researcher at SIPRI.

In technical terms, the alarms are not so much about the number of deployed warheads, which is rising slightly, but about the delivery systems that accompany them and are being renewed at breakneck speed. Nevertheless, beyond the arsenals of less transparent countries such as North Korea, which has about 60 warheads, or Israel, with around 90, SIPRI’s latest inventory draws attention to the growth of China, which now has 620 nuclear warheads, about 20 more than the previous year. It is estimated that most are stockpiled in storage far from silos for launch.

At the Victory Day parade held in September 2025, Beijing displayed several previously unseen systems, such as a new transporter for its DF-31 intercontinental ballistic missiles and a new launcher for the DF-61. Both missile models can carry nuclear warheads.

The rhetoric about the war has once again placed the atomic bomb and its deterrent capacity at the center of attention, even more so after the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the only surviving U.S.–Russia arms control agreement, expired in February. Since then no public meeting between the parties has been held to renew it. Washington now insists that negotiations include China at the table.

And tensions are rising. Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has several times issued threats brandishing its nuclear arsenal, particularly voiced by its former president and current deputy head of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev. The United States, despite Donald Trump’s ambiguity about NATO, continues to extend its nuclear umbrella over Europe. The European members of the Alliance — only France and the United Kingdom possess nuclear weapons, 290 and 225 respectively, of a strategic (long-range) character — are aware that without U.S. protection they would have no deterrent capacity.

Washington stores tactical (short-range) munitions in five allied countries (Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands), and other states such as the United Kingdom, Poland, Finland and Sweden have recently signaled interest in hosting this type of armament. In response to this interest, Moscow late last year deployed its hypersonic Oreshniks in neighboring and loyal ally Belarus — the two countries conducted military exercises with nuclear-capable weapons in mid-May. And alongside this increasingly intense battlefield, propaganda in the old Cold War style. On June 5, Saint Petersburg inaugurated an amusement-park attraction decorated with mock missiles and national colors. Its name: Oreshnik.

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At the helm of the pressure strategy on Mexico designed in Washington, on the hard-line side, there are two individuals: Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka. They are two well-known figures from Donald Trump’s circle of loyalists, both allies of his during his first presidency and whom the president recruited as soon as he secured a second term.

Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, is the better-known of the two, and is noted for his aggressive style and for serving between 2017 and 2021 as the architect of Trump’s most xenophobic policies.

Gorka worked for only seven months during Trump’s first term — enough time to advocate for the controversial ban on seven majority-Muslim countries that marked Trump’s debut in the White House. He also helped introduce into the MAGA movement an idea that has since become central to its rhetoric: that Islam is an existential threat to Western civilization.

After years as a MAGA media commentator, Gorka has returned to frontline politics as senior director for counter-terrorism on the National Security Council. In that role he has helped craft a newly successful strategy: making the fight against “narco-terrorism” a priority in Latin America, while framing criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking as an imminent threat to national security.

Part of that plan has involved adding some of those cartels to the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. It has also led to a campaign of extrajudicial military operations that has already claimed the lives of more than 200 crew members of alleged drug-running speedboats in Caribbean and Pacific waters.

Since the arrest on January 3 of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, who is awaiting trial in New York on drug-related charges, and with the machinery to strangle Cuba running at full speed to force change on the island, Mexico — long present in U.S. calculations — appears to have gained prominence in the priorities of the White House’s new Monroe Doctrine of interventionism, with moves such as the Department of Justice charging the governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha, and nine other senior state officials of links to a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Faced with rising tension in bilateral relations and with Trump’s strategy — the U.S. president has not concealed his wish for a military deployment and is pressing for cooperation against the cartels with neighbors such as Honduras and Guatemala — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum asked at a mass event last Sunday: “Is this really a legitimate interest in fighting organized crime, or are they trying to influence the 2027 election in our country?” Sheinbaum was also alluding to the increasingly evident alliances between the MAGA movement and Mexico’s far right.

“All of Miller’s obsessions converge on Mexico,” says a Washington source familiar with the bilateral relationship, listing the administration’s black marks and priorities that include irregular immigration, drug trafficking, and reaffirming U.S. national identity. “And to strengthen his hard-line stance the success of the narco-terrorism concept is essential, the reconceptualization of the so-called war on drugs that allows them to direct intelligence and military resources at it,” the source adds.

Fundamentalism in the background

After years in which Islamist terrorism was the primary U.S. concern — and as the country approaches the 25th anniversary of 9/11 — narcotrafficking moved to the top with the May publication of the U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy, which also takes aim at (and equates jihadism with drug mafias) a supposed domestic enemy: “Violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

After the document was published, Gorka — who was born in London to Hungarian parents and has been a U.S. citizen since 2012 — told Reuters that the strategy “prioritizes, above all, neutralizing terrorist threats in the hemisphere [the Americas] by disabling cartel operations until these groups are incapable of bringing their drugs, members, and trafficking victims into the United States.”

In March, Gorka spoke at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and offered a more theoretically elaborate justification for the pressure on Mexico than usual. “Trump believes in the Westphalian system of national sovereignty,” he said, attributing surprising subtlety to the president’s political analysis. “Imagine if Mexico operated as a fully Westphalian nation-state that exercised sovereignty in all its departments and municipalities,” the White House adviser continued. “Also, what is the other requirement of a nation-state? Not only sovereignty, but also the monopoly on the use of force. If cartels are driving heavily armored vehicles — often better armed than some units of the national armed forces — then you do not possess the monopoly on the use of force nor do you exercise sovereignty. Therefore, whether it is the United States, our allies or our partners, we cannot be safe in the field of counter-terrorism nor protect against terrorist threats if we do not understand the importance of exercising real sovereignty.”

Beyond the fight against drug trafficking — which often ignores that so much supply also responds to demand originating in the United States — the pressure on the southern neighbor is manifold. There are also tariffs, with the USMCA free trade agreement under renegotiation, and border control, a point Miller flagged from the start of Trump’s second presidency, which he likes to boast has seen “zero crossings” since he took office.

On that agenda, with different priorities acting simultaneously, “what matters on one of those fronts does not always matter in the others,” the Washington source explains. Hence the sometimes contradictory messages coming from the center of power in Washington, such as the one delivered this week by the new secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin. Speaking to the House of Representatives, he said he had traveled to Mexico City to “talk with Sheinbaum and her cabinet about cooperation” and was “impressed that they have been very cooperative, much more cooperative than the previous administration.”

It is the old carrot-and-stick strategy, in which Sheinbaum appears to handle herself well with an administration in Washington where concessions work but where limits also exist. An administration in which two of its hard men, Miller and Gorka, belong to the group that administers the sticks.

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