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By Hans M. Kristensen
The January 2011 issue of Air Force Magazine has a nice spread on the Chart Page where they reproduce a chart I produced of U.S. and Russian nuclear warhead inventories.
The chart is the product of the research and public education I do about the status of nuclear forces in collaboration with the nuclear program over at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
This chart was initially used in a de-alerting briefing at the United Nations last October.
This publication was made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York and Ploughshares Fund. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
Without information, without factual information, you can’t act. You can’t relate to the world you live in. And so it’s super important for us to be able to monitor what’s happening around the world, analyze the material, and translate it into something that different audiences can understand.
Russia currently maintains nearly 5,460 nuclear warheads, with an estimated 1,718 deployed. This represents a slight decrease in total warheads from previous years but still positions Russia as the world’s largest nuclear power alongside the United States.
Nuclear weapons budgeting is like agreeing to buying a house without knowing the sales price, the mortgage rate, or the monthly payment.
The United States Air Force has forward deployed about one-third of its B-2 stealth bombers to Diego Garcia, or about half the B-2s considered fully operational at any given time.