The NATO is in talks to develop more nuclear weapons by bringing them out of storage and into readiness in the face of a growing threat from Russia and China, the head of the Alliance.

As Jens Stoltenberg told the British newspaper Telegraph, there will be consultations among the members of the alliance for transparency about the use of their nuclear arsenal as a deterrent.

“I won’t go into the operational details of how many nuclear warheads should be operational and how many should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues. That’s exactly what we’re doing,” he told the paper.

“Transparency helps communicate the direct message that we, of course, are a nuclear alliance. NATO’s goal is a world without nuclear weapons, but as long as we have nuclear weapons, we will remain a nuclear alliance, because a world where Russia, China and North Korea have nuclear weapons and NATO doesn’t, it’s a more dangerous world,” he commented.

As Stoltenberg said last week, nuclear weapons are NATO’s “ultimate security guarantee” and a means of keeping the peace.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned that Moscow could use nuclear weapons to defend itself in extreme circumstances. He accuses the US and its European allies of pushing the world to the brink of nuclear conflict by giving Ukraine billions of dollars worth of weapons, some of which are being used against Russian soil.

NATO, which has taken a bigger role in coordinating arms supplies to Kiev, rarely talks about weapons in public, although the US is known to have deployed nuclear bombs at several locations in Europe.