Satellite imagery of RAF Lakenheath reveals new construction of a security perimeter around ten protective aircraft shelters in the designated nuclear area, the latest measure in a series of upgrades as the base prepares for the ability to store U.S. nuclear weapons. However, U.S. budget documents indicate that forthcoming upgrades to security and command and control are required before the base can accommodate a nuclear mission. These projects introduce more questions than answers about RAF Lakenheath’s nuclear status and what its role will be in the NATO nuclear strike mission. 

In addition to these upgrades, the United Kingdom recently announced plans to expand its nuclear posture by adding a nuclear role for the Royal Air Force through the purchase of 12 F-35As from the United States to join NATO’s nuclear sharing mission; a further reduction in the “independence” of the UK deterrent.

Combined, these changes mark a departure from decades of nuclear policy and underscore a broader shift in NATO nuclear posture in response to tensions with Russia. 

Are There New U.S. Nukes in the UK?

In July 2025, a set of two USAF C-17 flights directly from Kirtland AFB to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, England, triggered widespread rumors that nuclear weapons had been shipped to the base. While the indicators are strong, other Air Force budget documents raise questions about whether the necessary nuclear upgrades at the base have been completed to allow deployment yet.

Aside from Türkiye, each NATO country that hosts U.S. nuclear weapons has purchased the F-35A Lightning II to replace its legacy aircraft in the nuclear delivery role. In 2022, RAF Lakenheath became the first European base to receive the F-35A, and its 48th Fighter Wing remains the only USAF wing to operate both the F-15E and the F-35A nuclear-capable fighter aircraft. Years of accumulating evidence now point to the preparation of U.S.-operated RAF Lakenheath to receive U.S. B61 nuclear gravity bombs, marking the first time in nearly 20 years that the USAF nuclear mission has returned to the United Kingdom.

Then, on July 17, 2025, analysts tracked the flight of a C-17 nuclear transport plane associated with the Prime Nuclear Airlift Force from Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico to RAF Lakenheath. The direct flight from the USAF nuclear weapons depot at Albuquerque did not overfly other countries on its way to Lakenheath, a strong indicator that the aircraft could have been carrying nuclear materials. A second similar flight took place a few days later on July 23. During these dates, several signs, such as increased security measures at RAF Lakenheath, suggest that these flights could have been the first transfer of nuclear weapons to the base. Despite these strong indicators, several factors regarding additional command and security features raise doubts that a weapons shipment has already occurred. 

First and foremost, if nuclear weapons were to be deployed, we would expect to see a completed security perimeter around the designated nuclear area at RAF Lakenheath similar to what other nuclear bases across Europe have received (see figure 1). The FY25 USAF Military Construction Budget included a project for establishing a “Surety mission Protective Aircraft Shelter Barrier System,” which will consist of fencing, security gates, access and perimeter control roads, entry control points, and cybersecurity. The Air Force document states that the project is “required to provide a permanent perimeter security system around 22 Protective Aircraft Shelters that will be used to support the Surety mission.” Without these additional features, according to the US Air Force, “Royal Air Force Lakenheath lacks the physical security measures needed to protect Surety assets within the Protective Aircraft Shelters from unauthorized access, theft, damage, sabotage, or unauthorized use.” 

Figure 1. Comparison of Security for Nuclear Areas at U.S.-Operated Air Bases RAF Lakenheath (United Kingdom) and Aviano (Italy)

Notably, satellite imagery from Planet Laboratories does reveal the initial construction of a secure fencing perimeter in the designated nuclear area that began as early as February 2025. However, the construction is taking place around ten, not 22, of the protective aircraft shelters, as the FY26 budget had indicated. Meanwhile, there is no mention of this fencing project in the FY23 or FY24 budgets, and the FY25 budget states that construction for this project is set to start in May 2026, with completion anticipated for October 2029. There is also no mention of a fencing or “security barrier” project in the FY26 budget estimate. Additionally, the FY25 budget indicates that $185 million was requested and authorized for this project, but only $5 million was appropriated, meaning the project wasn’t cancelled, but Congress only released that number out of the total authorized funds. It is possible that the funding for this project could have been redesignated to come from a different budget, but it is nevertheless an odd discrepancy. 

Two other major infrastructure projects outlined in the U.S. Air Force FY26 military construction budget have yet to be completed. The first project is for a “Command Post” at RAF Lakenheath, which will involve replacing and improving security at facilities to meet intelligence security standards, hardening facilities to protect against “collateral effects,” and expanding capacity to accommodate an increase in staff to support the “surety mission” as well as the “Air Force Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications, and Global Aircrew Strategic Network Terminal equipment.” The budget states that “if this project is not provided, Royal Air Force Lakenheath will not be able to accommodate the Surety Beddown mission” (see figure 2). It continues, saying that without this facility, staff  “will not be able to implement the minimum command and control requirements at Royal Air Force Lakenheath. This limitation will impede mission capability, readiness, and contingency support to ongoing and future operations within the European area of responsibility.” Construction for the command post is not scheduled to begin until August 2027 and is not expected to be completed until July 2031. 

Figure 2. USAF FY26 and FY25 Military Construction Budget Descriptions of Security Projects Required to Accommodate Surety Mission at RAF Lakenheath

The second project outlined in the FY26 Air Force budget is a “Defender Operations Compound” at RAF Lakenheath, which includes a range of security-related infrastructure, personnel, and operational support, as the existing capacity is deemed “undersized for the current mission.” The purpose of this project is “to provide enhanced security capabilities supporting the potential stationing of specialized weapons at Royal Air Force Lakenheath. Specialized weapons surety includes materiel, personnel, and procedures contributing to the safeguarding and reliability of specialized weapons, and to the assurance that there will be no specialized weapon accidents, incidents, unauthorized weapon detonation, or degradation in performance at the target.” This section of the budget repeated a statement about the importance of this project for Lakenheath to be able to “accommodate the potential Surety mission beddown.” Construction is not scheduled to begin until March 2028 and is not expected to be completed until June 2031. Both of these programs—the Command Post and the Defender Operations Compound—were listed as “future projects” in the FY24 and FY25 budgets.

The ongoing construction of a security perimeter and the pending construction of command and control infrastructure outlined in the budget raise the question of whether the USAF would have deployed gravity bombs to Lakenheath already. Additionally, these uncertainties prompt further questions about whether Lakenheath’s role has shifted from a contingency site to a more permanent or semi-permanent deployment location.

If There Aren’t New U.S. Nukes Now, There Will Be At Some Point

Meanwhile, on June 24, 2025, the United Kingdom announced the purchase of 12 new nuclear-capable F-35As from the United States and its intention to join NATO’s nuclear sharing mission. These aircraft will be based at RAF Marham, an air base near Lakenheath with a similar Cold War nuclear legacy, and the base will also eventually be equipped to host U.S. nuclear gravity bombs in the 2030s. 

The United Kingdom retired and destroyed all its nonstrategic gravity bombs in 1998 and has since relied solely on four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines for its nuclear deterrent. The submarines carry ballistic missiles leased from the United States, and although the warhead has been developed and manufactured by the United Kingdom, the design is similar to the U.S. Navy’s W76 warhead, and the United States also supplies the reentry body. This decision to join the NATO nuclear-sharing mission with dual-capable aircraft equipped with U.S. nuclear bombs increases the United Kingdom’s reliance on the United States and marks a significant departure from decades of UK nuclear strategy and posture, apparently in reaction to the growing concern about Russia.

This plan was first hinted at in the UK’s latest Strategic Defence Review—published on June 2, 2025—which recommended that the Ministry of Defence “commence discussions with the United States and NATO on the potential benefits and feasibility of enhanced UK participation in NATO’s nuclear mission.” Less than a month later, the UK government formally announced its decision to buy the 12 F-35As from the United States. A parliamentary inquiry to the Minister of Armed Forces by the Defence Committee questioned whether the decision is coherent with the UK’s current nuclear doctrine and raised concerns about retaining British nuclear sovereignty, considering that the 12 F-35As will not be able to use their nuclear weapons unless authorized to do so by the president of the United States. The inquiry Chair also commented on how this change is the “most significant defence expansion since the Cold War” and noted that the UK’s Defence Nuclear Enterprise remains outside of meaningful parliamentary inquiry, despite accounting for around 20% of the total defence budget.

Similar to the upgrades taking place at Lakenheath, the future deployment of U.S. gravity bombs to RAF Marham will require significant upgrades to command and control and infrastructure at the base. From specialized tarmacs for the new F-35As, to updating the protective aircraft shelters and specialized WS3 storage vaults for nuclear gravity bombs (which were deactivated in the late-1990s), to improving security perimeters and installations at the base, RAF Marham has a long way to go before the nuclear mission becomes operational in the early 2030s.

The Bigger Picture in Europe

The nuclear upgrades at RAF Lakenheath and RAF Marham contradict statements made by NATO officials just a few years ago. In 2021, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated, “We have no plans of stationing any nuclear weapons in any other countries than we already have these nuclear weapons as part of our deterrence.” Two years later, in 2023, then-head of NATO nuclear policy Jessica Cox echoed Stoltenberg’s assurance, saying, “There is no need to change where they are placed.” 

The news of a potential deployment of nuclear weapons to RAF Lakenheath and the UK’s purchase of F-35As for the NATO nuclear mission are the latest in a series of developments showing increased nuclear posturing in Europe over the past decade. The deepening crisis with Russia has led to an increase in rhetoric, posture, and operational exercises involving nuclear weapons from the United States and NATO countries. Expansive upgrades to bases storing U.S. nuclear weapons across Europe, enhanced visibility of NATO’s annual tactical nuclear exercise, increased strategic bomber operations, and strategic missile submarines making port visits or surfacing for photo opportunities are just some of the more tangible signals that are raising the profile of nuclear weapons. France, too, has bolstered its nuclear rhetoric, increased spending on its nuclear program, and announced plans to establish another nuclear air base at Luxeuil-Saint-Sauveur in eastern France. 

All together, the NATO nuclear upgrades combined with Russia’s own upgrades and nuclear sharing with Belarus, illustrate a deepening reliance on nuclear weapons for security in Europe. The United Kingdom’s entry into the NATO nuclear mission and the likely deployment of U.S. B61 bombs to not one but two bases in the United Kingdom mark the first time since the end of the Cold War that the number of nuclear bases in Europe and the amount of nuclear weapons on European territory could be growing rather than decreasing. 

For the last two years, experts from the Federation of American Scientists and Nagasaki University have engaged with American, Japanese and South Korean experts as well as partners with valuable insights on nuclear policies in China and Russia to assess the risks of nuclear use and escalation in Northeast Asia.  The results of this work are sobering, but not surprising.  The growing reliance on nuclear weapons and growing geo-political tensions in the region are a recipe for nuclear disaster.  Only purposeful and coordinated actions among countries that seek to avoid war and the use of nuclear weapons can reverse these trends and address these dangers.  If current trends and dynamics continue, the risk of nuclear use will continue to increase.

Our consultations included commissioned working papers from U.S., Japanese and South Korean authors, as well as experts on China and Russia to assess the role nuclear weapons play in the security policies of those countries, and how each country views the prospect of war and nuclear risk.  Two workshops, one in Seoul and one in Tokyo, were convened by our organizations over the last year and a half.  These events included discussions both before and after the U.S. election, and before and after the declaration of martial law in South Korea. The papers and discussions led to a recently published special feature on “The Future of Nuclear Stability in East Asia” of Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament ( J-PAND) . 

As the lead researchers for this project, we have developed the following assessments and believe pursuing a set of concrete and deliberate recommendations are essential if Governments seek to reduce the risks of nuclear conflict through accident or miscalculation.  The authors do not assume that such steps will change the broader geo-strategic realities in the region. However, these steps, if integrated into government action, offer the prospect of constructive collaboration among states where such efforts are scarce. Furthermore, it remains possible that, once engaged on an issue of mutual self-preservation, the momentum can be created for other cooperative efforts.

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Reducing Nuclear Risks and Salience

Unless the policies and activities of all nuclear-armed states and their allies change in East Asia, the probability of a nuclear crisis will continue to grow.  This reality should be alarming to all states in the region, as all will suffer should the region (or the world) witness the use of nuclear weapons in combat or even during peacetime as tools for coercion.  What is needed is both a recognition of the dynamics driving the potential for crisis by national leaders, coupled with deliberate actions to reduce the risks of accident, escalation, and, where possible, reliance on nuclear weapons for anything other than core nuclear deterrence.  Even then, the risks of accidents due to human behavior and complex systems should lead any responsible country to establish in advance a set of mechanisms for communicating to avoid misperception or mistakes when a crisis emerges, which inevitably will.

Of course, not all analysts see these dynamics the same way.  The dominant view in the United States is that America’s nuclear capabilities are both essential and highly valuable in both deterring and assuring, and the more reliable and credible these capabilities are, the more stable will be U.S. alliances, and the region as a whole.  However, if one considers multiple national perspectives as well as the risks of both accident and miscalculation, there are clear consequences for increasing nuclear salience and enhancing reliance on nuclear weapons that should lead to a deeper examination of alternatives and steps to mitigate those risks.  At a minimum, recognizing that the risk of nuclear acquisition, signaling, and use in the region are increasing must lead to closer examination of ways to reduce the risks of accidental or unintended conflict, and to find ways to separate broader U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons from the possible decision by more states in the region to acquire nuclear weapons of their own. 

Of course, as long as nuclear weapons exist, there will be an inherent risk that they will be used, and indeed multiple nations continue to rely on nuclear deterrence as a basis for their security.  However, there should be no tolerance for accepting unnecessary nuclear risks associated with accidents and miscalculation.  Moreover, while all states seek to project their ability to use and manage escalation to their own benefit, there needs to be greater work invested to understanding escalation dynamics among all states in the region and time spent avoiding the risk of uncontrolled or runaway escalation pressures.

In its simplest form, the world and the nations of the region need to recognize that they are part of a multipolar nuclear vortex of potential conflict among four states with nuclear weapons, and two others advanced conventionally-armed states who could trigger (intentionally or otherwise) a conflict with global dimensions.  The risks of conflict in the region are as grave as they have ever been, and concerted, reasoned and multi-faceted efforts to manage the nuclear risks inherent in the region are required.

Just as states in the region have different perspectives about what enhances or reduces stability, states also have different interests when it comes to measures perceived to enhance stability and predictability.  Eager to maintain the regional security status quo, the United States has sought for many years to promote a set of dialogues and norms to reduce the risks of conflict and accident.  However, not content with the status quo, in which the United States maintains broad sway and can project military power in the region, China has resisted crisis management or risk reduction efforts. U.S. officials have proposed repeatedly to establish a set of guard rails on escalation, to which Chinese officials have remarks that such protections may only encourage the U.S. to continue reckless behavior.

Nevertheless, all states regardless of history and intent need to be attentive to the region’s growing nuclear dangers.  Russia, China, and the United States have adopted a common position that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.  North Korea, which is not recognized formally as a nuclear-weapon state under the NPT, has not issued any similar statements.  However, the consequences of any nuclear use in the region would be extreme and must be avoided at all costs.  

Steps that could be pursued to that end are discussed below.  These include working to reinforce the norm of non-nuclear use, as well as development of tangible mechanisms that can be used in a crisis to communicate and potentially avoid unwanted or accidental escalation.

Political and Diplomatic Steps

Nuclear Leadership

Leaders in the participant countries, and mainly in those with nuclear weapons, need to invest the time and effort to better understand the magnitude of the nuclear risks they manifest, and to communicate with each other at the direct, personal level that they understand those realities.  In all of the affected countries, the military services and organizations that support nuclear missions tend to take on a momentum of their own in service of providing their leadership with options for military victory and possible nuclear use. That is their job, yet their actions also can place pressures on leaders whose interests are necessarily broader.  Demonstrating at a high political level that those authorized to use and provide options for the use of nuclear weapons understand the risks and consequences involved is an essential step in reducing nuclear dangers.  The temptation to bluff, project indifference, or adopt “mad man” postures must be conclusively rejected by all states in the region.

Allied/Conventional Leadership

Japan and South Korea, as the non-nuclear states in the region – as well as Taiwan – should continue to take and expand efforts to encourage constructive engagement and risk reduction measures so that leaders of China, the United States, Russia and North Korea recognize the new nuclear age the world has entered.  The lessons that led the leaders of the Soviet Union and United States to end the last global nuclear arms race appear to have been forgotten or lost, a form of collective amnesia about the virtues of cooperative approaches to tempering risks. America’s non-nuclear allies can stimulate broader engagement including through academic, Track II, civil society, economic and other forms of indirect, non-governmental engagement. These channels may not produce immediate results, but should be pursued as they are low risk approaches that can be valuable in expanding consultations, increasing the flow of information, and identifying opportunities for governmental engagement.   Through intermediaries, regional groupings, and other bi- and multilateral settings, the non-nuclear weapon states endangered by the nuclear dynamics in East Asia need to increase their efforts to build and support risk reduction dialogues, or avenues for those discussions among the nuclear states.  

Intra-alliance Discussions

In today’s environment, it is both important and appropriate for U.S. allies to be vocal in encouraging the United States to remain an active security provider and a conduit for constructive dialogues in the region. However, U.S. allies should also speak out and engage their counterparts in Washington when and if they believe it will be harder for them to continue strong security cooperation with the United States if Washington is not actively seeking to reduce the risks of escalation to the nuclear level in a conflict with other regional powers.  There is no region where U.S. allies can expect to reap security benefits of a nuclear alliance with Washington without risk.  Yet it remains impossible to predict how increased nuclear risks might influence political dynamics in U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan.  This dynamic should be an open part of expanding extended deterrence and security discussions among the U.S. and its security partners.

Within the U.S. extended deterrent relationships with South Korea and Japan, as well as its partnership with Taiwan, there also needs to be a more fulsome and mature discussion about the balance between deterrence and defense, and risks of nuclear escalation.  The U.S. relationships with Japan and South Korea especially over the last decades has matured to the point that Tokyo and Seoul take an active role in understanding, assessing, characterizing, and planning detailed responses to specific threat scenarios.  This coordination benefits all of the states, but should also include active discussions about conventional-nuclear weapon dynamics, including the risks of accidents and escalation within and beyond the nuclear level, and develop more robust tools for preventing and controlling such escalation, and avoiding miscommunication and accidents.  It is unknown, and perhaps unknowable in advance of a conflict, whether the United States will act on its defense commitments in a conflict.  However, with increased doubts about U.S. commitments comes the risk both that U.S. allies will seek to expand their own capabilities, drawing a reaction from China and North Korea (while allies’ actions are already reactions to their actions), and furthering the action-reaction cycle that defines arms race instability.  Of course, there is also the omnipresent concern that China or North Korea will miscalculate, may assume they can act with impunity, and then find the U.S. ready, willing and able to meet its defense commitments.  In short, the region is going to be more unstable and U.S. allies have a direct interest in ensuring not only that they are prepared to face a possible attack, but that they and the United States invest the time and effort now to avoid a conflict should one start by accident or through miscalculation, or escalate beyond the conventional level.

One of the most positive developments for security and deterrence in East Asia over the last few years has been the improved coordination and tempering of political animus between Japan and South Korea, owing in part to the active encouragement of the United States.  It is no overstatement that the United States cannot hope to create a stable deterrent relationship with China if it is unable to work with two like-minded partners in Japan and South Korea, not least if those two countries cannot work together toward a common goal of stability and conflict avoidance.  To be sure, Seoul and Tokyo have different threat concerns and priorities.  But the ability to deter conflict, project strength and coordination, and act quickly and decisively to terminate a conflict and avoid escalation comes through enhanced and durable political and military coordination and collaboration among the United States and its allies in the region.  A thickening of US-ROK-Japan as a trilateral security partnership is among the best options those states have to preserve peace and stability in East Asia.

Technical Tools

It remains an open question whether geopolitical tension in the region have led to arms racing or whether arms racing has led to geopolitical tensions.  The growth of conflict and tension in the region is a long history and regardless of whether one believes weapons drive conflict or conflict drives weapons, the dynamics in the region are clear for all to see.  It is possible that no amount of dialogue, engagement, and risk reduction efforts will disrupt these dynamics.  The history of humanity is, in many ways, the history of warfare.  However, that history is also loaded with episodes of unwanted and unnecessary conflicts that were detrimental to all involved.  As technology improves, countries and other groups will have tools to reduce the risks of accidents and miscommunication, as well as unintended escalation.  To be effective, these tools need to be in place before any conflict begins.  Examples include:

Crisis communication tools

The public often considers telephone hotlines as the standard tool for communicating with leaders in a crisis. However, it is not widely known that the United States and Soviet Union, and later Russia, put in place a basic but more capable computer-based system that did not rely on voice communications between leaders to pass messages, but established an open computer display in each capital to ensure that no matter the contingency, messages could be sent and read without any action by the receiving side. In fact, the nuclear risk reduction centers remain in place and in use between Washington and Moscow to this day. The ability to send a message without having to wait for the other side to “pick up the phone” has proved to have important political and technical advantages over more simple telecommunications.

No similar system (except for some bilateral mechanisms that require the other side to respond) exists anywhere in East Asia between the United States or any of the countries in the region. The establishment of risk reduction communication centers in all of the capitals, or simply establishing them between bilateral pairs, is one way to create mechanisms before a crisis strikes to help resolve misunderstandings or miscommunications. While it is entirely possible that a message sent will not be reciprocated or well received, there is little to any cost to establishing such a system. Indeed, even the absence of a response can be important information that aids decision making.

The United States and Russia could offer to expand their current system to include other countries, share and demonstrate the technology that they use for consideration by China, South Korea, Japan, and North Korea, or pairs of states could establish similar networks on their own. One way to facilitate this process might also be for a civil society group, such as National Academies of Science or other equivalent academic centers to establish test networks that could be used and demonstrated over a period of months for national military and leaderships in the individual countries to observe the system in use before they commit to them as a political decision.

Incident Agreements

The United States and the Soviet Union worked over the course of the Cold War to establish norms of behavior and then create operational tools for their militaries to communicate at the operational level to manage accidents.  These were largely successful both in providing tools to manage crises and signaling that both sides had an interest in avoiding unintended or unwanted conflicts. Despite efforts to create similar systems and tools in East Asia, agreements or tools that have been put in place (such as 1998 US-China Military Maritime Consultative Agreement as well as 2018 Maritime and Aerial Communication Mechanism between the Japan-China Defense Authorities and 2023 Hotline between Japanese and Chinese Defense Authorities) to manage potential incidents among the relevant armed forces (naval and air forces being the main focus with China, and ground forces being a major concern on the Korean Peninsula) are far from enough. They should first make these existing mechanisms effective and useful and then expand them to establish norms of behavior and create operational communication tools.

Not all states in the region support the establishment of such mechanisms, but they are a potentially useful tool that willing states should look to establish and promote.  Demonstrating responsible behavior and signaling a concern about the direction of regional security are both valuable opportunities for leaders, and despite some concerns would have no tangible effect on the ability to both deter and prepare for a potential clash of forces.  There have been multiple studies done on best practices for such systems including how to establish pre-existing norms of behavior, conduits for communication, and how states should behave if an accident or unplanned clash among forces takes place.  These efforts should continue and be enhanced.  Where possible U.S., ROK and Japanese approach for intra-alliance/partner behavior and products  should be published and promoted as standards that could form the basis for broadening of such efforts to include China and North Korea, as well as Russia.

Build and Use Open-Source Networks

The space revolution has provided governments and independent analysts with a stunning set of tools that previously were inaccessible to all but intelligence agencies in a handful of developed countries.  Now, the availability of commercial observation satellites and low-cost drones create potential tools for states in the region to monitor each other’s military behaviors, anticipate potential moves that undermine the security of another, and have detailed information that can be used as part of risk reduction or crisis management processes.  Obviously, not all countries in East Asia are pleased with the newfound transparency that can be imposed from outside of their own borders, but this technology will only continue to expand and provide potential tools for others in the region. This will at once reduce the likelihood of military surprises, yet at the same time, the growth of information manipulation technologies, including artificial intelligence, will mean that not everything a country can see is necessarily the truth. This balance between information and mis- or disinformation is a particular challenge in the 21^st-century that should concern all states in the region, even though that might seek to use mis- and disinformation to their own advantage.

One concept that should be further developed and promoted is the creation of open-source information fusion cells, involving relevant experts from all of the countries involved in East Asian security dynamics. Having a single location with participants from the various countries who can assess, analyze, and even discuss data being provided by open-source capabilities could be a powerful tool in developing a common framework for discussing a crisis, should one take place.  It is unlikely given the current political dynamics that all of the countries in the region will soon agree to establish such a center, thus an interim step might be to establish a trial open-source operation through academic or non-governmental civil society organization that could be accessed by countries in the region by invitation.

Build on what is working

One of the simplest tools for avoiding miscalculation utilized by the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia has been advance notification of ballistic missile test launches.  More recently, the United States and China have engaged in apparently reciprocal advance notifications of recent ICBMs tests.  This basic step can avoid the risk that a simple test launch might occur at a time of tension and catch any state off guard.  Efforts should be made by the United States and China to encourage other states in the region, including North Korea, to follow this standard model to encourage responsible behavior, if not moderation. 

Other Steps by the United States, and Allies and Partners 

These above steps, whether used in bilateral or multilateral settings, could improve the ability of states to avoid a crisis or manage one should it take place.  However, there are other steps 

that can be pursued by the United States and its friends and allies in the region that can also improve the outlook for avoiding unwanted or unnecessary nuclear risks.

Broaden routine deterrence and assurance dialogues among the United States and its allies and partners in both bilateral and multilateral formats. Existing dialogues and committees have been useful political tools for improving transparency within bilateral alliances, improving trilateral engagement, and finding ways to enhance military reassurance and deterrence.  However, these discussions often overlook other important areas of interdependence among the United States, Japan, and South Korea—and how their cooperation in these areas contributes to the security and prosperity of all three countries.  In addition to continuing and deepening these discussions, to include regular engagement on what specific threats they seek to deter and how to do so without taking unnecessary nuclear risks, the countries should also look to engage on economic, technical, cultural, and human exchange dynamics to deepen the anchors for these alliances and partnerships that form the basis for their security in the region.

Expand trilateral communication and coordination mechanisms among the United States, Japan and ROK. Japanese and ROK officials in particular need to put forward a very clear demand signal to the United States that they value the trilateral process consolidated during the Biden administration and would welcome efforts to expand the scope of their engagement. These dialogues should seek to adopt a heavier emphasis on crisis, coordination and scenario planning, to include both escalation and de-escalation scenarios, as well as to conduct exercises around unexpected or surprise events.

Consider tighter regional missile defense architectures. Missile defense is becoming an increasingly important element of deterrence by denial in the region. It is increasingly clear that effective missile defenses can play a significant role in deterring adversaries and reassuring allies. In this regard, developing tighter regional missile defense architectures should be considered. If coordinating and implementing regional missile defense architectures among the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan proves successful, it could have an important politically stabilizing effect by linking them together and reinforcing their relationships in the face of potential political challenges. However, several important issues must be kept in mind when considering regional cooperation on missile defenses, for example, concerns that such cooperation could further stimulate investment in ballistic missile capabilities by North Korea, China, and Russia (although they are already expanding their capabilities regardless), as well as rising costs of missile defense systems. Advancing cooperation between Japan and South Korea still remains politically fragile, posing a challenge to regional cooperation. Furthermore, if Taiwan is to be included in such a regional architecture, China will certainly react harshly both politically and militarily. While the delicate and complex nature of regional relations must be carefully weighed, developing tighter regional missile defense architectures is worth considering.

Promote broader dialogue on the utility and risks of reliance on nuclear deterrence. Nuclear weapons are clearly an important component of strategic deterrence, but they are not a panacea and because of their immense destructive power they should always and only be an option of last resort.  This tone needs to be routinely re-injected into alliance discussion to avoid over-reliance on nuclear options and to ensure that nuclear reliance does not become an adversary to prudent and more stabilizing conventional investments for both deterrence and combat.  Additional discussions should be pursued to determine when and how it would be possible to reduce or even eliminate the role for nuclear weapons in some contingencies in favor of conventional options that may increase the efficacy of conventional deterrence and escalation management.

Engage adversaries, in close consultation with allies, even if the prospects for progress are limited.  Its willingness to break with conventional wisdom and engage adversaries is one area where the current American administration may have a distinct advantage over its predecessors.  President Trump has demonstrated that he does not feel constrained in talking with U.S. adversaries, and is willing and even eager to engage with the leadership of foreign countries with historically adversarial or difficult relations with the United States. This high-level engagement provides an opportunity to breakthrough bureaucratic hurdles and achieve terrific strides, if effectively planned and managed.  President Trump could choose to reengage North Korea, has even after launching military strikes against Iran offered to pursue diplomacy with Tehran, and is reportedly eager to negotiate and engage directly with China’s president.  If any of these dialogues are pursued, then important crisis management and avoidance tools should be brought into these high-level dialogues by the United States.  In particular, as it was pointed out in the article of the J-PAND’s special issue  on “Nuclear Weapons and China’s National Security: Consistency, Evolvement and Risk Management”, there may be great value in establishing procedures for risk reduction that focus on the timeliness of the tools as well as standardization and maintenance activities to ensure that these tools are operable when needed.  At the same time while more complicated, it may be possible for the leaders of these countries or their designated technical teams to work on identifying potential flashpoints and reach task agreements on how the two sides can identify and possibly avoid what are seen as provocative actions.  It remains to be seen whether or not China or North Korea are interested in pursuing such high-level high stakes diplomacy, and if they do whether they will be open to areas that have traditionally been excluded from past dialogues. However, if in this new environment, China and North Korea are able to recognize the risks of nuclear escalation and agree that all states in the region would be better off reducing the risk of accidental or unintended nuclear use, then there are tools that all three countries, in close consultations with Japan and South Korea, could pursue to achieve those ends.

Conclusion

None of the steps including above alone or collectively will eliminate the risks of conflict among the multiple nuclear and nuclear dependent states in Northeast Asia.  The economic, political and security stakes and dynamics indicate that the region will remain one influenced by tension and increasing military risk until there are fundamental changes in the region, including the nature of leadership in multiple countries, or until there is a collective understanding about the benefits to be gained through political and security engagement and broader integration.  While those changes seem unlikely, history is filled with examples where previously insurmountable changes were achieved through unexpected developments.

That being said Northeast Asia looks to occupy in the 21^st century the same space Europe occupied the 20^th century as a potential flashpoint for military and political tensions among great powers and their partner states.  The fact that multiple countries possess nuclear weapons and are dependent on them ultimately for their security, makes the risks of accident, miscalculation, or escalation much more dangerous than the Cold War period. It will take consistent leadership and action to navigate the complex dangers in the region and to avoid what many analysts considered to be an increasingly possible outcome, a nuclear conflict in East Asia.

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Since 2020, China has dramatically expanded its nuclear arsenal. That year, the Pentagon estimated China’s stockpile of warheads in the low 200s and projected that it would “at least double in size.”¹ Two years later, the report warned that China would “likely field a stockpile of about 1500 warheads by its 2035 timeline.”² Both inside and outside government, the finding has transformed discourse on U.S. nuclear weapons policy.

Adm. Charles Richard, while Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, warned that changes in China’s nuclear forces would fundamentally alter how the United States practices strategic deterrence. In 2021, Richard told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “for the first time in history, the nation is facing two nuclear-capable, strategic peer adversaries at the same time.”³ In his view, China is pursuing “explosive growth and modernization of its nuclear and conventional forces” that will provide “the capability to execute any plausible nuclear employment strategy.”⁴ In Richard’s view, the United States is facing a “crisis” of deterrence that will require major shifts in U.S. nuclear strategy.⁵ “We’re rewriting deterrence theory,” he told an audience.⁶ For Richard, the danger is not just that the United States would face two separate major power, nuclear-armed adversaries but two nuclear peers that can coordinate their actions or act to exploit opportunities created by the other.

How the United States responds to China’s nuclear buildup will shape the global nuclear balance for the rest of the century. For many observers, the “two nuclear peer problem” presents an existential choice because existing U.S. nuclear force structure and strategy cannot maintain deterrence against two nuclear peers simultaneously. There are only three options: expand the capability of U.S. nuclear force structure; shift nuclear strategy to engage nonmilitary targets;⁷ or do nothing, which increases the risk of regional aggression and nuclear use.

Despite this growing wave of concern and commentary, there has been no systematic studies that define the nature of the “two nuclear peer problem” and the options available to the United States and its allies for responding to China’s nuclear buildup. An informed decision about how to respond to China’s buildup will depend on answering two additional questions.

First, what exactly is the threat posed by China’s expanding nuclear forces? What is a “two nuclear peer problem” and will the United States face one in the next decade? Specifically, will China’s nuclear buildup render U.S. nuclear forces incapable of attaining critical objectives for deterring nuclear attacks.

Second, what are the best options for responding to China’s expanding nuclear forces? What are the available options to modify U.S. nuclear force structure given existing constraints and will these options effectively correct vulnerabilities created by a “two nuclear peer problem?” Would these options create new risks to the interests of the United States and its allies? 

In the following chapters, we each consider a central aspect of the “two nuclear peer problem” and the options available to meet it. Though we have tried to coordinate our chapters so they do not overlap, and build on assumptions and data regarding U.S. and Chinese nuclear forces, each chapter is the work of a single author. We do not present a consensus perspective or set of recommendations and do not necessarily endorse the arguments made in neighboring chapters.

In chapter 2, Adam Mount surveys expert analysis and the statements of government officials to develop a more rigorous definition of the “two nuclear peer problem” than currently exists in the literature. Characterizing and categorizing the risks posed by a tripolar system leads to an unappreciated possibility: there is no “two nuclear peer problem” in the way that the problem is commonly presented. As it stands today, the prominent and influential discourse on the “two nuclear peer problem” does not clearly or accurately characterize the risks posed by China’s expanding nuclear forces, nor the range of options available to U.S. officials to respond. The need to deter two nuclear adversaries does not necessarily create a qualitatively new problem for U.S. strategic deterrence posture.

Subsequent chapters evaluate important pieces of the “two nuclear peer problem” in detail. In chapter 3, Hans Kristensen presents new estimates of U.S. and Chinese force structure to 2035. He provides correctives against excessive estimates of China’s current and future capability and argues it should not properly be considered a nuclear peer of the United States.

The final chapters consider two plausible ways that a tripolar system could present a qualitatively new threat to U.S. deterrence credibility. In chapter 4, Pranay Vaddi considers how China’s buildup will affect U.S. nuclear strategy. He surveys how U.S. planning has historically approached China and evaluates multiple courses of action for how the United States might adapt. In chapter 5, John Warden examines the prospects for Sino-Russian cooperation in peacetime, in crisis, in conventional conflict, and in a nuclear conflict. He argues that it is not only the material facts of China’s buildup that will drive U.S. planning, but the expectations and risk acceptance of U.S. officials with respect to Sino-Russian coordination and U.S. extended deterrence commitments. 

The authors are grateful to Carnegie Corporation of New York for their generous funding of the project, as well as innumerable colleagues, academics, and government officials for informative discussions. The authors each write in an independent capacity. Their chapters do not reflect the positions of any organization or government.

The president of the United States is the only person in the country who can order the use of nuclear weapons, a power commonly known as “sole authority.” This power is granted to the president largely through policy tradition, but the president’s Constitutional role as Commander-in-Chief is often cited as the legal basis. Sole authority was first codified in 1948 when the National Security Council (NSC) adopted the conclusions of NSC-30, which read: “The decision as to the employment of atomic weapons in the event of war is to be made by the Chief Executive when he considers such decision to be required.” The policy has since been reaffirmed in numerous official documents, including, most recently, the Department of Defense’s 2024 Report to Congress on the Nuclear Employment Strategy of the United States, which states, “the Guidance reaffirms that the President remains the sole authority to direct U.S. nuclear employment.”

Despite its foundational place in U.S. nuclear policy, sole authority has for years come under heavy scrutiny by experts, journalists, and American citizens. Experts publish pieces warning of the dangers of such a system, people take to social media to remind their networks that “this is the guy with the nuclear codes” whenever the president acts in a concerning manner, and lawmakers even introduce legislation to try to constrain the president’s authority. Recent polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Carnegie Corporation of New York found that 61% of Americans are either somewhat or very uncomfortable with the president having sole authority over nuclear launch decisions.

Sole authority appears like a dangerous toy in the hands of unstable, unreliable, or erratic presidents. President Bill Clinton reportedly lost his nuclear authorization codes for months during his presidency. Jimmy Carter rumoredly sent his codes to the dry cleaners in the pocket of his suit jacket. Following the assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan in 1981, Reagan was separated from his military aide, and all of his clothes, including the pants in which the card carrying his nuclear codes sat, were stripped in the hospital and thrown away. His codes were later recovered by the FBI from a hospital trash can. Further, the mental and intellectual reliability of presidents has been questioned, with Reagan’s formal Alzheimer’s diagnosis coming just five years after he left office, John F. Kennedy’s known use of strong pain medications, Richard Nixon’s heavy drinking and erratic behavior leading up to his resignation, and Donald Trump’s history of making flippant remarks and threats of nuclear use, to name a few. 

Other concerns with presidential sole authority include the immense time and psychological pressure placed on presidents in crisis scenarios that hinders rational thinking, the challenge to democratic values posed by a system that places ultimate power in one individual’s hands, the ethical and legal burden placed on lower level military officials, and more. But before we can attempt to solve the broad “problem” of sole authority, a more thorough understanding of it is needed. 

This report investigates how we arrived at this system of launch authority in the United States today. It traces the origins of sole authority to the earliest days of the nuclear age and follows the history of trial and error — with new procedures and systems added or abandoned as vulnerabilities were detected and new technology emerged — culminating in an assumption that we have arrived today at the optimal system for nuclear launch authority. This report interrogates that assumption first by providing an in-depth understanding of how the policy of sole authority works today and how the nuclear enterprise in the United States is set up to enable it, then by evaluating the risks and vulnerabilities that remain. Finally, the report analyzes the merits and drawbacks of policy proposals that have been put forward by experts and lawmakers to answer a crucial question: is sole authority solvable, or is it truly the best system possible for nuclear launch authority? If the latter, should we accept that reality?

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On September 3, 2025, China showcased its military power in a parade commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the end of World War II. The parade featured a large number of new military weapons and equipment, including new and modified nuclear systems that had not been previously publicly displayed. This parade was also the first time China had showcased land-, sea-, and air-launched nuclear weapons in the same parade, marking an important milestone in the country’s longtime effort to establish a nuclear triad.

As in some previous parades, the official announcer for the 2025 parade clearly distinguished between the nuclear and conventional weapon systems displayed during the parade. Hypersonic missiles such as the DF-17 and the DF-26D were grouped in conventional formations, whereas the five weapon systems that followed were explicitly referred to as being part of the nuclear formation. This language may be innocuous, but largely fits with Western descriptions of the weapons.

Although only one of the nuclear weapons presented at the parade was entirely new (the DF-61 ICBM), that and the many other systems displayed in this and previous parades – combined with the construction of three large missile silo fields and so far more than a tripling of the nuclear warhead stockpile – vividly illustrate the significant modernization and buildup of nuclear forces that China has undertaken over the past couple of decades. This buildup appears to contradict China’s obligations under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and risks stimulating nuclear buildups in the United States and India – developments that would not be in China’s interest. Instead of building up the nuclear arsenal, the Chinese leadership instead should freeze it and work with the other nuclear-armed states to responsibly limit the numbers and roles of nuclear weapons.

In the sections below we describe the nuclear weapons displayed at the parade and their role in the Chinese nuclear posture.

Ground-based nuclear missiles

Based on new information from the parade footage, it seems China now has nine different versions of land-based ICBMs: DF-5A, DF-5B, DF-5C, DF-27 (not yet displayed in public), DF-31A, DF-31AG, DF-31BJ, DF-41, and DF-61. Interestingly, rather than necessarily representing incremental upgrades, many of the missiles are quite distinct from one another: five are road-mobile, and four are silo-based; three are liquid-fueled, four are solid-fueled, and two are unconfirmed; at least one carries MIRVs, at least one carries an HGV, at least one carries a multi-megaton warhead, and one may even carry a conventional warhead. 

The DF-61

The DF-61 is a new missile that was grouped alongside the DF-31BJ, JL-3, and JL-1 nuclear systems during the parade, suggesting it is also nuclear. The display of the DF-61 ICBM launcher was a surprise because the Chinese Rocket Force (PLARF) is still fielding the DF-41, and the two systems are strikingly similar.  In fact, the DF-61 launcher displayed at this year’s parade appears to be nearly identical to the DF-41 launcher displayed in the 2019 parade. Other than the paint job, they look the same (see image below; image sizes and angles vary slightly). This raises the question of whether the DF-61 missile is a modified version of the DF-41 missile. Another possibility is that the DF-61 is the conventional ICBM rumored to be under development by China, but that doesn’t fit with the DF-61 being displayed as part of the nuclear group. (Instead, the conventional ICBM could be the DF-27, which was not displayed at the parade.)

The DF-61 ICBM launcher displayed at the 2025 Victory Day Parade looks almost identical to the DF-41 ICBM launcher displayed in 2019.

The DF-31BJ

The vehicle identified in the parade as DF-31BJ looks different than a road-mobile launcher with its stub end of the missile canister and the personnel compartment only including the left side for the driver (see image below). It is possible that this vehicle is a missile loader and the DF-31BJ is the designation of the ICBM assigned to the three large silo fields in northern China. The “J” likely denotes the silo basing, as the Chinese character “井” or “jing” means “well” and is used by the PLA to describe silos.

The DF-31BJ is possibly a missile transport loader for the ICBMs being loaded into China’s three large silo fields.

The DOD reported last year that China probably began loading a DF-31-class solid-fuel ICBM across its three new ICBM silo fields. To do that, a missile transport and loading truck would be needed, which might be the DF-31BJ displayed at the parade. The status of the silo loading is unknown in public, but we estimated early this year that perhaps 30 silos had been loaded. While silo loading at the three silo fields has not been publicly shown, a possible load training operation at the Jilantai training complex in 2021 shows a 20-meter truck that might have been an early version of the DF-31BJ (see image below).

A possible DF-31BJ missile transporter is seen in 2021 practicing loading an ICBM into a silo at the Jilantai training complex in northern China.

The DF-5C

The long-rumored DF-5C was displayed with all three sections: the first stage on a long trailer at the rear, the upper stage on a shorter trailer, and a warhead reentry vehicle shape in the front. This is similar to the first display of the original DF-5 at the parade back in 1984 (see image below).

The DF-5C ICBM lineup in the 2025 parade is similar to the initial DF-5 display in the 1984 parade four decades ago.

The DF-5C is, according to the DOD, intended to carry a multi-megaton warhead. As such, it is probably a replacement for the DF-5A first deployed in the 1980s, which is already equipped with a multi-megaton warhead. Another version, known as the DF-5B, is capable of delivering up to five smaller MIRVs.

Similar to the DF-5 in the 1984 parade, the four DF-5Cs were displayed with four cone-shaped reentry vehicle shapes intended to illustrate the aeroshell designed to protect the multi-megaton warhead during reentry of the atmosphere (see below).

The 2025 parade displayed the reentry vehicle shape for the DF-5C multi-megaton warhead.

Sea-based nuclear missile

The Chinese Navy displayed the JL-3 (Julang-3) sea-launched ballistic missile, which is currently being back-fitted onto modified Jin-class (Type 094A) ballistic missile submarines at their homeport on Hainan Island in the South China Sea.

The JL-3 displayed at this year’s parade (above) looks very similar to the JL-2 displayed in the 2019 parade (below), with no visible external changes to the payload section or fuel stages.

The JL-3 has a longer range than its predecessor, JL-2, probably around 10,000 kilometers, according to the DOD. Although the DOD claims this is “giving the PRC the ability to target [the continental United States] from littoral waters,” that is not the case if the missile is launched from the South China Sea. Launching from the shallow Bohai Sea or the Yellow Sea would probably be less secure.

Air-delivered nuclear missile

For the first time, China displayed a nuclear weapons system for delivery by aircraft. This is the JL-1, or JingLei-1, translating to “sudden thunder” (not to be confused with the JL-3 or Julang-3 submarine-launched ballistic missile, which translates to “massive wave”). The official parade commentator described it as an “air-based long-range missile.”

The JL-1 air-launched ballistic missile for the H-6N bomber was displayed in the 2025 parade for the first time.

This is likely the air-launched ballistic missile (designated CH-AS-X-13 by the DOD) that the Chinese air force has been working on for several years to integrate on the H-6N intermediate-range bomber. The first bomber base to be equipped for the nuclear mission is thought to be Neixiang air base in Henan province.

The JL-1 ALBM seen loaded on the H-6N bomber. Image: @lqy99021608

The H-6N does not have an intercontinental range like Russian and U.S. bombers. To increase its range, the H-6N has been equipped with a refueling boom that enables the bomber to refuel during flight. Several H-6Ns were seen during the parade flying in formation with Y-20U tankers (the quality of images from the parade was hampered by air pollution, so an archive photo is used below), which is a converted Y-20 military transport aircraft that can refuel both bombers and fighter jets. The first known public imagery of an H-6N by a Y-20U tanker is from January 2025.

The nuclear-capable H-6N was displayed with a Y-20U tanker (archive photo).

Other Missile Launchers

The weapons described above were grouped in the nuclear part of the parade. Noticeable weapons in the conventional weapons lineup included the DF-26D (a new conventional variant of the DF-26 that also includes a nuclear version), the DF-17 medium-range hypersonic glide vehicle, and the CJ-1000 (sometimes also described as DF-1000) long-range cruise missile.

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Additional Information:

• Chinese nuclear weapons, 2025
• Status of world nuclear forces
• The FAS Nuclear Information Project

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This article was researched and written with generous contributions from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Jubitz Family Foundation, the New-Land Foundation, Ploughshares, the Prospect Hill Foundation, and individual donors.

In the eighty years since the first successful test of a nuclear weapon, generations of effort has been spent to limit the spread of these weapons and prevent their use. The Federation of American Scientists, since our founding in 1945, has played a central role in helping understand the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and diligently worked to ensure the policy debate is informed by scientific and technical data. As part of our continuing legacy, the Global Risk program at FAS partnered with the Washington Post to publish a five part opinion series entitled: The Next Nuclear Age. 

With 2000 nuclear weapons on alert, far more powerful than the first bomb tested in the Jornada Del Muerto during the Trinity Test 80 years ago, our world has been fundamentally altered. This series resurfaces clear warnings that nuclear policy is not just a relic of days gone past. Past generations had this threat at the forefront of their minds as a clear and present danger to the future civilization. However distant 80 years may feel, the threat still reaches into contemporary times with most recently the nuclear program of Iran becoming the target of strikes by the U.S. Military. 

The Iran strikes are the manifestation of a debate mostly relegated to non-proliferation policy circles. We can watch as the preemptive effort to halt progress of Iran’s nuclear weapons program plays out in press conferences and analysis rather than the hypothetical. The strikes on Iran offer a unique pivot to evaluate some of the underlying assumptions about deterrence and what role the U.S. is willing to play in international institutions with our allies. There has been much analysis of the Iran strikes framed using the traditional logic of being able to halt programmatic development through brute force, i.e. bomb enrichment sites. In my assessment, more progress has been made and could continue to be made by supporting the sanctions regime and using more social coercion by partnering with our allies and supporting international institutions. When we choose to use military force, we ultimately trade in our legitimacy in the rules based order, pushing our allies to look at building their own nukes for security.  

The real world implications of nuclear policy and diplomacy can be seen in the unfolding story with Iran, which is not quite done yet. The Next Nuclear Age as a five part series surfaces and grapples with the realities of living in the nuclear age and dispels myths surrounding nuclear policy and non-proliferation. Each part paints a vivid picture that reviews the history of nuclear close calls and details how the long-standing norm against proliferation is eroding. The subsequent articles describe how a nuclear war could start, who controls the use of nuclear weapons in the United States, and how a nuclear attack could unfold in the United States.     

In the post Cold War Era, nuclear weapons have largely faded from the heat of popular culture however their threat is still a sobering reality. The Next Nuclear Age series serves as a reminder that the durability of the nuclear threat is omnipresent in modern life. Thousands of weapons are aimed and on high alert, one person has sole authority to launch, and a growing number of nations are considering spending billions to secure nuclear options as tensions rise.   

After decades of work trying to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons, our days ahead look riskier than in years prior. The multipolar geopolitical landscape exponentially raises risks of accidents and increases excuses to jump into an arms race. Countries are falsely substituting military capability for political credibility therefore increasing risk. Our allies and institutions are being clobbered by disinformation and mistrust and we are left feeling the pinch, having to result in widely unpopular military interventions in potentially protracted conflicts. 

This series showcases how the accidents, miscalculations, and escalatory spirals have more room to become trigger points. Compressed decision-making timeframes revealed in the final installment show how quickly rational deliberation can give way to existential pressure. What worries me is that we’ve given up tools in our tool box that monitor and reduce risk. We’ve traded out diplomatic solutions and investment for military build up and an expensive vanity project of Trump’s Golden Dome. Ultimately it is our responsibility as citizens to uphold policymakers to account on these weapons before the unthinkable becomes inevitable. 

Part 1:  Why we should worry about nuclear weapons again

The Cold War prospect of global annihilation has faded from consciousness, but the warheads remain.

By Jon B. Wolfsthal, Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda

The threat of nuclear weapons since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been largely absent from the public’s consciousness. Stockpiles have been reduced from Cold War highs but the thousands of  remaining weapons could still destroy humanity.  

“It is as if the lessons of the Cold War — that there is never a finish line to the arms race and that more effective nuclear weapons do not lead to stability and security — have been forgotten by the current generation of defense planners.” 

The new frame of great power competition among the US, Russia and China, plus new nuclear dangers make today’s nuclear age more complicated and dangerous than the nuclear standoff between the first two major powers of the late 20th century. Nuclear policy experts refer to the U.S.-Russia-China nuclear triangle as a ‘three body problem’. However the ‘three body problem’ definition neglects the reality that nine countries have nuclear weapons. Any of the nuclear armed states could set off a global nuclear war.   The public needs to relearn the language of nuclear risk and a new generation of leaders will be required to manage these dangers.   

Part 2: How nuclear war could start

To understand how it could all go wrong, look at how it almost did.

By Hans Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns and Allie Maloney

Roughly 2000 nuclear weapons that are on alert at any time across the globe. These weapons are ready to launch from submarines, dropped from planes and rocketed to targets. Some are mobile, fixed or in transit; all of them are vulnerable to accidents or affected by human or technical error.    

“The end of humanity could arrive in minutes — that is what makes nuclear war so different from other wars.”

If there is one thing that can be counted on, it’s that nuclear accidents are bound to happen. It’s a matter of when, not if. One of the most dangerous parts of having nuclear arsenals is that accidents involving nuclear weapons could cause an acute global crisis, involving a web of interlocking states, enemies, and adversaries. The delicate balance of crisis can be spurred towards destruction when non-nuclear conflicts spill over into an escalatory spiral towards nuclear use, spelling destruction for all involved. 

Part 3: Only one American can start a nuclear war: The president

The American president has the sole authority to order a nuclear strike, even if every adviser in the room is against it.

By Mackenzie Knight-Boyle

The authority to launch nuclear weapons in the United States rests on the shoulders of only one person, the President. Codified in both law and tradition, the President has the sole authority to launch a nuclear strike that once authorized is unstoppable. The established process to order a nuclear strike, using the ‘black book’, is a well choreographed procedure designed to provide the most streamlined options to the President in a time of crisis.        

“The start of nuclear war, the probable deaths of millions and the choice of which cities to decimate — the black book distills these realities into a sanitized list of options that a former military aide to President Bill Clinton likened to a “Denny’s breakfast menu.”

The Constitution grants to only Congress in Article One the right to declare war. That said, a President has unilateral legal authority to launch nuclear weapons, even if the United States or its allies have not been attacked, runs counter to the way the US system was designed to operate. Such a weighty and world altering decision ought to be made using a system of checks and balances, not by one individual.  

Part 4: What’s making some countries daydream about nukes again?

With or without Iran, the number of nuclear states could double, raising the risk of catastrophe.

By Jon B. Wolfsthal, Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda

The incentives for developing nuclear weapons have changed in a world that has been rising in conflict. Paired simultaneously with reduced confidence among its allies that the United States is a reliable partner, the second largest nuclear armed state, allies and enemies alike are pushed into a new paradigm. Nuclear weapons are hard and expensive to build however with the incentives of security shifting towards development, some countries are willing to front the cost. 

“Deterrence and reassurance depend on both military capability and political credibility. The credibility of a promise to protect is the fragile part of the calculus.” 

A mass proliferation of nuclear weapons would ultimately cause more opportunities for accidents or misuse. This alone is a major reason why limiting the development of nuclear weapons is such a pressing issue. More weapons of mass destruction is more opportunity for things to go wrong, leading to irreversible consequences.  

Part 5: How a nuclear attack on the U.S. might unfold, step by step

The American reaction to an attack is classified, but details made public paint a harrowing picture.

By Mackenzie Knight-Boyle

The process of how the U.S. would react to nuclear attack is classified; however there is a predictable path that it may follow based on public data. This article follows how a response would proceed. The ramifications on U.S. soil and abroad would be devastating.   

“The defense secretary interjects, urging the president to make a decision in the next two minutes or risk losing the ability to retaliate.”

In the situation room, or wherever the President is deciding to make a launch, the space and time pushes the decision towards launch. As U.S. assets are targeted, the potential for ability to respond is shortened. Making the decision window in an accident scenario potentially just as lethal as an intentional launch. Some countries in order to amend this pressure have instituted ‘No First Launch’ policies whereby a country needs to be verifiably attacked with nuclear weapons to respond in kind – such a policy could be used in the U.S. to preempt accidental launch. 

In 1942, the United States formally began the Manhattan Project, which led to the production, testing, and use of nuclear weapons. In August 1945, the United States dropped two nuclear weapons on Japanese cities, killing around 200,000 people by the end of 1945 and leaving survivors with cancer, leukemia and other illnesses caused by radiation exposure. While this was their only use in wartime, states have detonated nuclear weapons many times since for testing purposes, producing radioactive fallout. Many U.S. nuclear weapons production activities, including the mining of uranium and testing of the weapons themselves, have occurred outside of the continental United States. Notably, explosive testing in the Pacific islands and ocean spread radioactive fallout to Marshallese, Japanese, and Gilbertese people, forcibly displacing entire communities and producing intergenerational illnesses. 

Much of the scholarship surrounding the effects of nuclear weapons on environmental and human health is framed within a potential detonation scenario. For example, studies have shown that even a regional nuclear war would cause millions of immediate deaths and trigger a “nuclear winter,” a shift in the climate that would disrupt agricultural production, thus killing hundreds of millions more through starvation. Additionally, in 2024, the United Nations General Assembly voted to create an independent scientific panel to study the health, environmental and economic consequences of nuclear war. While such research is crucial for understanding the consequences of nuclear weapons use, nuclear weapons are built, maintained, and deployed everyday, impacting communities at every stage even before detonation. Studying only the predictive futures of the use of a nuclear weapon in war is insufficient in understanding nuclear weapons’ holistic humanitarian impact. According to former Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, “The heart of American deterrence is the people who protect us and our allies. Here at STRATCOM, you proudly stand up—day in and day out and around the clock—to defend us from catastrophe and to build a safer and more peaceful future. So let us always ensure that the most dangerous weapons ever produced by human science are managed with the greatest responsibility ever produced by human government.” Nuclear deterrence theory contends that a retaliatory nuclear strike is so threatening that an adversary will not attack in the first place. Thus, nuclear advocates often suggest that these weapons protect American citizens and the U.S. homeland. This report demonstrates, however, that the creation and sustainment of the nuclear deterrent harms members of the American public. As the United States continues nuclear modernization on all legs of its nuclear triad through the creation of new variants of warheads, missiles, and delivery platforms, examining the effects of nuclear weapons production on the public is ever more pressing.

Read the full report here

This report was produced with generous support from Norwegian People’s Aid.

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The quantitative and qualitative enhancements to global nuclear arsenals in the past decade—particularly China’s nuclear buildup, Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling, and NATO’s response—have recently reinvigorated debates about how nuclear-armed states intend to use their nuclear weapons, and against which targets, in what some describe as a new Cold War. 

Details about who, what, where, when, why, and how countries target with their nuclear weapons are some of states’ most closely held secrets. Targeting information rarely reaches the public, and discussions almost exclusively take place behind closed doors—either in the depths of military headquarters and command posts, or in the halls of defense contractors and think tanks. The general public is, to a significant extent, excluded from those discussions. This is largely because nuclear weapons create unique expectations and requirements about secrecy and privileged access that, at times, can seem borderline undemocratic. Revealing targeting information could open up a country’s nuclear policies and intentions to intense scrutiny by its adversaries, its allies, and—crucially—its citizens. 

This presents a significant democratic challenge for nuclear-armed countries and the international community. Despite the profound implications for national and international security, the intense secrecy means that most individuals—not only including the citizens of nuclear-armed countries and others that would bear the consequences of nuclear use, but also lawmakers in nuclear-armed and nuclear umbrella states that vote on nuclear weapons programs and policies—do not have much understanding of how countries make fateful decisions about what to target during wartime, and how. When lawmakers in nuclear-armed countries approve military spending bills that enhance or increase nuclear and conventional forces, they often do so with little knowledge of how those bills could have implications for nuclear targeting plans. And individuals across the globe do not know whether they live in places that are likely to be nuclear targets, or what the consequences of a nuclear war would be.

While it is reasonable for governments to keep the most sensitive aspects of nuclear policies secret, the rights of their citizens to have access to general knowledge about these issues is equally valid so they may know about the consequences to themselves and their country, and so that they can make informed assessments and decisions about their respective government’s nuclear policies. Under ideal conditions, individuals should reasonably be able to know whether their cities or nearby military bases are nuclear targets and whether their government’s policies make it more or less likely that nuclear weapons will be used.

As an organization that seeks to empower individuals, lawmakers, and journalists with factual information about critical topics that most affect them, the Federation of American Scientists—through this report—aims to help fill some of these significant knowledge gaps. This report illuminates what we know and do not know about each country’s nuclear targeting policies and practices, and considers how they are formulated, how they have changed in recent decades, whether allies play a role in influencing them, and why some countries are more open about their policies than others. The report does not claim to be comprehensive or complete, but rather should be considered as a primer to help inform the public, policymakers, and other stakeholders. This report may be updated as more information becomes available.

Given the secrecy associated with nuclear targeting information, it is important at the outset to acknowledge the limitations of using exclusively open sources to conduct analysis on this topic. Information in and about different nuclear-armed states varies significantly. For countries like the United States—where nuclear targeting policies have been publicly described and are regularly debated inside and outside of government among subject matter experts—official sources can be used to obtain a basic understanding of how nuclear targets are nominated, vetted, and ultimately selected, as well as how targeting fits into the military strategy. However, there is very little publicly available information about the nuclear strike plans themselves or the specific methodology and assumptions that underpin them. For less transparent countries like Russia and China—where targeting strategy and plans are rarely discussed in public—media sources, third-country intelligence estimates, and nuclear force structure analysis can be used, in conjunction with official statements or statements from retired officials, to make educated assumptions about targeting policies and strategies. 

It is important to note that a country’s relative level of transparency regarding its nuclear targeting policies does not necessarily echo its level of transparency regarding other aspects of its governance structure. Ironically, some of the most secretive and authoritarian nuclear-armed states are remarkably vocal about what they would target in a nuclear war. This is typically because those same countries use nuclear rhetoric as a means to communicate deterrence signals to their respective adversaries and to demonstrate to their own population that they are standing up to foreign threats. For example, while North Korea keeps many aspects of its nuclear program secret, it has occasionally stated precisely which high-profile targets in South Korea and across the Indo-Pacific region it would strike with nuclear weapons. In contrast, some other countries might consider that frequently issuing nuclear threats or openly discussing targeting policies could potentially undermine their strategic deterrent and even lower the threshold for nuclear use.

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Nearly one year after the Pentagon certified the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program to continue after it incurred critical cost and schedule overruns, the new nuclear missile could once again be in trouble.¹

An April 16th article from Defense Daily broke the news that the Air Force will have to dig new holes for the Sentinel silos.² The service had been planning to refurbish the existing 450 Minuteman silos but recently discovered, as noted in a follow-up article from Breaking Defense, that the silos will “largely not be reusable after all.”³ Brig. Gen. William Rogers, the Air Force’s director of the ICBM Systems Directorate, cited asbestos, lead paint, and other issues with the existing silos that make refurbishment difficult.⁴ Air Force officials also stated that an ongoing study into missileer cancer rates played a role in the decision to build new silos.⁵ 

This news comes shortly after reports that the Air Force is planning to extend the life of the currently deployed Minuteman III ICBMs until “at least” 2050—roughly 20 years beyond their intended service lives—due to delays in the Sentinel program.⁶ 

For those who have been tracking the Sentinel development since the Air Force first conceptualized a new ICBM in the early 2010s, the reports of Minuteman life-extension likely made them pause and recall the common refrain from Sentinel proponents over the years that life-extending Minuteman III missiles would be too expensive or even impossible. “You cannot life-extend Minuteman III,” then-commander of US Strategic Command Adm. Charles Richard told reporters in 2021.⁷ In 2016, the Air Force told Congress that the Minuteman III was aging out, therefore the “GBSD solution” was necessary to ensure the future viability of the ICBM force (GBSD is short for Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, the programmatic name for the ICBM before Sentinel was chosen in 2022). Air Force officials still maintain that a life-extension program for Minuteman is not possible. In their words, Minuteman will be “sustain[ed] to keep it viable until Sentinel is delivered.”⁸ Regardless of how the Air Force refers to the effort, it appears that Minuteman III will be made to operate well beyond its planned service life.

For some, like our team at the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, Sentinel’s newest struggles came as no surprise at all. For years, it has been clear to observers that this program has suffered from chronic unaccountability, overconfidence, poor performance, and mismanagement. Project benchmarks were cherry-picked, viable alternatives were prematurely dismissed, competition was discouraged, and goalposts were continuously moved. Ultimately, it will be U.S. taxpayers who pay the increasingly rising costs, and other—more critical—priorities will suffer as Sentinel continuously sucks money away from other programs. 

It comes as no surprise that Sentinel was specifically named in the White House’s recent memo requiring all Major Defense Acquisition Programs more than 15% over-budget or behind schedule to be “reviewed for cancellation;” Sentinel is the poster-child for inefficiency, which the administration claims to be obsessed with eliminating.⁹ In order to prevent this type of mismanagement for future programs, we must first understand how Sentinel went so wrong. 

How We Got Here

The Federation of American Scientists has been intensively tracking the progress of the Sentinel program for years. Throughout the acquisition process, the Air Force clung to its fundamental and counterintuitive assumption that building an entirely new ICBM from scratch would be cheaper than life-extending the current system. We now know that this assumption was wildly incorrect, but how did it reach this point? 

Cherry-picked project benchmarks

When seeking to plug a capability gap, the Pentagon is required to consider a range of procurement options before proceeding with its acquisition. This process takes place over several years and culminates in an “Analysis of Alternatives”—a comparative evaluation of the operational effectiveness, suitability, risk, and life-cycle costs of the various options under consideration. This assessment can have tremendous implications for an acquisition program, as it documents the rationale for recommending a particular course of action. 

The Air Force’s Analysis of Alternatives for the program that would eventually become Sentinel was conducted between 2013 and 2014, and concluded that the costs of pursuing a Minuteman III life-extension would be nearly the same as those projected for Sentinel.¹⁰ Crucially, this cost comparison was pegged to a predetermined requirement to continue deploying the same number of missiles until the year 2075.¹¹ 

These benchmarks, despite having no apparent inalterable national security imperative, appear to have played a significant role in shaping perceptions of the two options. While it is now clear that Minuteman III could be—and likely will be—life-extended for several more decades, the Air Force does not have enough airframes to keep at least 400 of them in service through 2075 and maintain the testing campaign needed to ensure reliability. As a result, in order to push the ICBM force beyond 2075, the Air Force would need to life-extend Minuteman III and pursue a follow-on system after that point. 

This was reportedly reflected in the Air Force’s cost analysis, which explains why the cost of the Minuteman III life-extension option was estimated by the Air Force to be roughly the same as the cost of building an entirely new ICBM.¹² The service was not simply comparing the costs of a life-extension and a brand-new system; it was instead comparing the costs of pursuing Sentinel immediately on the one hand, versus a Minuteman III life-extension and development of a follow-on system on the other hand. 

Of course, policymakers require benchmarks in order to make estimates: it would not be reasonable to analyze the feasibility of a particular system without considering how long and at what level that system needs to perform. However, in the case of the Sentinel, selecting those particular benchmarks at the beginning of the process essentially pre-baked the analysis before it even began in earnest. 

Let’s say a different evaluation benchmark had been selected—2050, for example, rather than 2075. 

In January 2025, Defense Daily reported that the Air Force would likely have to keep portions of the Minuteman III fleet in service until 2050 or later.¹³ This may require altering certain aspects of the Minuteman III’s deployment—such as reducing the number of deployed ICBMs or annual test launches in order to preserve airframes. While no final decisions have been made, the Air Force is clearly evaluating continued reliance on Minuteman III as a potential option, despite years of high-ranking military and political officials stating that doing so was impossible.¹⁴ 

Benchmarking the cost analysis at 2050 rather than 2075 would have thus yielded wildly different results. In 2012, the Air Force admitted that it cost only $7 billion to modernize its Minuteman III ICBMs into “basically new missiles except for the shell.”¹⁵ While getting those same missiles past 2050 would certainly add additional cost and complexity—particularly to replace parts whose manufacturers no longer exist—it is unfathomable that the costs would come anywhere close to those of the Sentinel program, which was estimated by the Pentagon’s Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) in 2020 (before the critical cost overrun) to have a total lifecycle cost of $264 billion in then-year dollars.

It is particularly troubling that very few public or independent government-sponsored analyses were conducted to look into the Sentinel program’s flawed assumptions, nor the realistic possibility of a Minuteman III life-extension. Countless congressional and non-governmental attempts to push for one were stymied at every turn. In 2019, for example, dozens of lobbyists from the Sentinel contract bidders successfully helped to eliminate a proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act calling for an independent study on a Minuteman III life-extension program.¹⁶ 

The most comprehensive public study on this issue was a 2022 report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace under contract from the Pentagon; however, the study noted that “the iterative process through which we received information, the unclassified nature of our study, and the limited time available for investigating DOD conclusions left us unable to assess the DOD’s position regarding the technical and cost feasibility of an extended Minuteman III alternative to GBSD;” the authors ultimately concluded that a more detailed technical analysis was required in order to answer these questions.¹⁷ 

While the findings of such a study will never be known, it is likely that they would have supported what was clear to government watchdogs at the time and has been validated in spades since then: the assumptions baked into this program were flawed from the start, and the system’s costs would be significantly larger than initially expected. Given that the Pentagon ultimately went in the opposite direction, taxpayers are now on the hook for both a de facto Minuteman III life-extension program as well as the substantial costs associated with acquiring Sentinel—with limited further possibilities for near-term cost mitigation. 

Failure to predict the true costs and needs of the program

In addition to the cherry-picked benchmarks that tipped the scales towards a brand-new ICBM, when comparing costs the Air Force made a key error in its assumptions: it assumed that the Sentinel would be able to reuse much of the original Minuteman launch infrastructure. 

Some level of infrastructure modernization for the Sentinel was always planned, including building entirely new launch control centers and additional infrastructure for the launch facilities.¹⁸ However, the original plans called for reusing existing copper command and control cabling and the refurbishment—not reconstruction—of 450 silos. Both assumptions have proven incorrect, and perhaps more than anything else, now represent the single greatest driver of Sentinel’s skyrocketing costs. 

While both the current cabling and launch facilities work fine for the existing Minuteman III and would presumably function similarly following a life-extension, they are apparently incompatible with Sentinel’s increasingly complex design. 

The Air Force must now dig up and replace 7,500 miles of cabling with the latest fiber optic cables. Much of these cables are buried underneath private property, meaning that local landowners must lease 100-foot-wide lines on their property to the Pentagon to be dug up for multi-year periods.¹⁹ 

In addition, both the Air Force and Northrop Grumman have now recognized that it will take more than simple refurbishments to make the existing Minuteman III launch facilities compatible with Sentinel. Both the service and the contractor have stated that several of the assumptions regarding the conversion process that went into the 2020 baseline review have now proved to be incorrect.²⁰ 

As a result, the Air Force is apparently now planning to build entirely new launch facilities to house the Sentinel, most of which will require digging new holes in the ground.²¹ As one Northrop Grumman official explained, “When you multiply that by 450, if every silo is a little bit bigger or has an extra component, that actually drives a lot of cost because of the sheer number of them that are being updated.”²² It is unclear whether the costs will increase beyond the new estimate released with the Nunn-McCurdy decision, but the program is clearly trending in the wrong direction.

The Air Force had been publicly teasing the prospect of digging new holes for nearly a year. At the Triad Symposium in Washington, D.C., in September 2024, Maj. Gen. Colin Connor, director of ICBM Modernization at Barksdale Air Force Base, responded to an audience question about the new silos rumor by saying, “we’re looking at all of our options.” Despite the noncommittal answer, the decision to dig new silos seems to have already been made by the time of Connor’s statement. 

Firstly, it has since been revealed that the estimated costs of the new silos were included in the Nunn-McCurdy review process which concluded in July 2024. Additionally, although the decision was not made public until the April 16 Defense News article, Northrop Grumman may have inadvertently revealed the news much earlier. Included in the gallery of images of the Sentinel program on Northrop’s website is a digital mockup of a Sentinel launch facility. The first version of the image (see Figure A below) illustrates the Air Force’s original plan to refurbish the Minuteman III silos for Sentinel, with a key indicating the silo and silo lid as “Reclaimed MMIII Facilities.” A newer version of the image (see Figure B below) was uploaded to the gallery as early as February 2024 and shows the entire launch facility—including the silo and silo lid—as “New Sentinel Facilities.”

Figure A

Original rendering of Sentinel launch facility. (Source: Northrop Grumman)

Figure B

New rendering of Sentinel launch facility. (Source: Northrop Grumman)

Unwarranted overconfidence 

Despite the clear concerns outlined above, the Pentagon was remarkably confident in its and Northrop Grumman’s abilities to deliver the Sentinel on-time and on-budget. 

In September 2020, the Pentagon delivered its Milestone B summary report to Congress—a key decision point at which acquisition programs are authorized to enter the Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase, considered to be the official start of a program. The Milestone B report included an estimate of $95.8 billion in then-year dollars to acquire the Sentinel—a significant increase from previous estimates, but not yet the dire situation that we find ourselves in today (Figure C). 

Figure C

The above table from the Congressional Budget Office shows the cost growth for the Sentinel’s acquisition program between the Sentinel’s Milestone B assessment in 2020 and the post-Nunn-McCurdy review process in 2025. All costs are reflected in FY2020 dollars to allow for an accurate comparison between years.

We now know, however, based on recent statements from Pentagon and Air Force officials, that there were “some gaps in maturity” in the Milestone B report.²³ Specifically, “in September of 2020, the knowledge of the ground-based segment of this program was insufficient in hindsight to have a high-quality cost estimate.” What this means is that at the most consequential stage of the program to-date, it was approved without a comprehensive understanding of the likely cost growth. 

Furthermore, the Air Force was heavily delayed in creating an integrated master schedule for the Sentinel program. An integrated master schedule includes the planned work, the resources necessary to accomplish that work, and the associated budget; from the government’s perspective, it is considered to be the keystone for program management.²⁴ Although the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment testified to Congress that “By the time you’re six months after Milestone B, you should have an integrated master schedule,” the Air Force had not met this mark.²⁵ If the Air Force did manage to create such a schedule, it became obsolete with the Nunn-McCurdy Act’s requirement to restructure the program and rescind its Milestone B approval.

During that same hearing, the Air Force’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Deterrence and Nuclear Integration also admitted that at that time, the service had been experiencing poor communication with Northrop Grumman, the primary contractor for the ICBM. 

Performance issues also appear to have had an impact on the program. In June 2024, the Air Force removed the colonel in charge of its Sentinel program—reportedly for a “failure to follow operational procedures”—and replaced him with a two-star general, with the rank change indicating a need for greater high-level attention.²⁶ 

Throughout this time, the Air Force remained overconfident in its abilities to deliver the program; in December 2020, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics told reporters that the Air Force had “godlike insight into all things GBSD.”²⁷ And in September 2022, the Air Force Major General responsible for Sentinel’s strategic planning and requirements said in a Breaking Defense interview that the program was “on cost, on schedule, and the acquisition program baseline is being met.”²⁸ 

Given everything we now know about the state of the Sentinel program, these statements were either clear obfuscations or just pure fantasy. 

Non-competitive disadvantages

When addressing concerns about the rising projected costs of the Sentinel program, Air Force leaders were confident that a competitive and healthy industrial base would be able to keep the overall price tag down. As Gen. Timothy Ray, then-Commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, told reporters in 2019, “our estimates are in the billions of savings over the lifespan of the weapon.”²⁹ 

These expected savings clearly never materialized, however, nor did the Pentagon help facilitate the conditions for them to be realized. In March 2018, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center submitted a document justifying its intention to restrict competition for the Sentinel contract to just two suppliers—Boeing and Northrop Grumman—stating that this limitation would still constrain costs because the two companies would be in competition with one another.³⁰ 

However, this specter of competition evaporated when Boeing withdrew from the competition following Northrop Grumman’s acquisition of Orbital ATK—one of two independent producers of large solid rocket motors left in the US market.³¹ As these motors are necessary to make ICBMs fly, the merger put Northrop Grumman in the driver’s seat: it could restrict access to those motors from Boeing, thus tanking its competitor’s chances at the Sentinel bid. 

Doing so would not have been allowed by the terms of the Federal Trade Commission, which permitted the merger in 2018 but subsequently investigated it in 2022 under the Biden administration, and also subsequently blocked a similar attempted merger between Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne that same year.³² However, the Pentagon, which had initially included non-exclusionary and pro-competition language in its requirements for an earlier phase of the Sentinel contract, removed that language from future phases.³³ By refusing to wield its own power to preserve competition—initially a key driver for promoting Sentinel over a Minuteman III life-extension—the Air Force essentially left the state of the competition in Northrop Grumman’s hands. According to Boeing’s CEO, Northrop Grumman subsequently slow-walked the process of hammering out a competition arrangement with Boeing—apparently not leaving enough time for Boeing to negotiate a competitive price for solid rocket motors before the Sentinel deadline.³⁴ 

As a result, Boeing pulled out of the competition altogether, and the Air Force awarded the Sentinel engineering and manufacturing development contract to Northrop Grumman through an unprecedented single-source bidding process. As the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment admitted during 2024 testimony to Congress, what this amounted to was that “effectively there was not, at the end of the day, competition in this program.”³⁵ 

Reflecting on the Sentinel procurement process, House Armed Services Committee chairman Adam Smith—who has a sizable Boeing presence in his home state of Washington—suggested in October 2019 that the Air Force is “way too close to the contractors they are working with,” and implied that the service was biased towards Northrop Grumman.³⁶ 

Predictably, the evaporation of competition has coincided with skyrocketing Sentinel acquisition costs. In July 2024, the Air Force’s acquisition chief Andrew Hunter reportedly told reporters that the Air Force was considering reopening parts of the Sentinel contract to bids. “I think there are elements of the ground infrastructure where there may be opportunities for competition that we can add to the acquisition strategy for Sentinel,” Hunter said.³⁷

The Nunn-McCurdy Saga

In January 2024, the Air Force notified Congress that the Sentinel program had incurred a critical breach of the Nunn-McCurdy Act, legislation designed to keep expensive programs in check.³⁸ One week after notifying Congress of the breach, the Air Force fired the head of the Sentinel program, but said the move was “not directly related” to the Nunn-McCurdy breach.³⁹

At the time of the notification, the Air Force stated that the program was 37% over budget and two years behind schedule. Six months later, after conducting the cost reassessment mandated by Nunn-McCurdy, the Pentagon announced that the Sentinel program would cost 81% more than projected and be delayed by several years.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, the Secretary of Defense certified the program to continue. 

Per the requirements of the Nunn-McCurdy Act, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, who serves as the Milestone Decision Authority for the program, rescinded Sentinel’s Milestone B approval, which is needed for a program to enter the engineering and manufacturing development phase.⁴¹ The Air Force must restructure the program to address the root cause of the cost growth before receiving a new milestone approval, a process the service has said will take approximately 18 to 24 months.⁴² 

Where Sentinel Stands Now

Work on the Sentinel program has continued while the Air Force carries out the restructuring effort, but the government can’t seem to decide whether things are going well or not.  

On February 10, the Air Force told Defense One that parts of the Sentinel program had been “suspended.”⁴³ Due to “evolving” requirements related to Sentinel launch facilities, the Air Force instructed Northrop Grumman to halt “design, testing, and construction work related to the Command & Launch Segment.” There has been no indication of when the stop work order will be lifted. Nevertheless, during an April 10 Air Force town hall on Sentinel in Kimball, Nebraska, Wing Commander of F.E. Warren AFB Col. Johnny Galbert told attendees that Sentinel “is not on hold; it is moving forward.”⁴⁴

Just under one month after the stop work order was made, the Air Force announced that the Sentinel program had achieved a “modernization milestone” with the successful static fire test of Sentinel’s stage-one solid rocket motor.⁴⁵ The test marked the successful test firing of each stage of Sentinel’s rocket motor after the second and third stages were tested in 2024. 

On March 27, the same day Bloomberg reported that the Air Force was considering a life-extension program for Minuteman III missiles, President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Air Force (confirmed by the Senate on May 13), Troy Meinke, committed in his testimony to pushing Sentinel over the finish line, calling the program “foundational to strategic deterrence and defense of the homeland.”⁴⁶ During the same hearing, Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment, Michael P. Duffey, also shared his support for the Sentinel program, saying “nuclear modernization is the backbone of our strategic deterrent,” and endorsing Sentinel as “critical.” Yet, two weeks later, on April 9, President Trump signed an executive order to address defense acquisition programs that mandates, “any program more than 15% behind schedule or 15% over cost will be scrutinized for cancellation.”⁴⁷ This places Sentinel well beyond the threshold for potential cancellation, and the White House fact sheet detailing the order explicitly called out Sentinel’s cost and schedule overruns.

The next day, the Air Force announced that another “key milestone” for the Sentinel program had been met with the stand-up of Detachment 11 at Malmstrom AFB, which will oversee implementation of the Sentinel program at the base.⁴⁸ But of course, less than thirty days later, Sentinel took a major blow with the Air Force’s admittance that hundreds of new silos would have to be dug up and constructed for the new ICBM. 

The Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) latest Weapon Systems Annual Assessment from June 11 reports that Sentinel’s costs “could swell further” as the Air Force “continues to evaluate its options and develop a new schedule as part of restructuring efforts.” The assessment also notes that the Sentinel program alone accounted for over $36 billion of the $49.3 billion increase from 2024 to 2025 in GAO’s combined total estimate of major defense acquisition program costs, and noted that the first flight test now would not take place until March 2028.⁴⁹ In a sweeping criticism of the program, the GAO report notes that the continued immaturity of the program’s critical technologies more than 4 years into its development phase “calls into question the level of work required to mature these technologies and the validity of the cost estimate used to certify the program.”⁵⁰

450 Money Pits

We probably will never know how much money could have been saved if the Air Force had elected from the beginning to life-extend the existing ICBMs rather than build an entirely new system from scratch. The opportunity to have a proactive, independent cost comparison and corresponding public debate was eliminated through intense rounds of Pentagon and industry lobbying. But we certainly now know that the Air Force’s assertion—that the Sentinel would be cheaper and easier than a life-extension—was wrong, and that the suppression of an independent review contributed to these rising costs. 

The Sentinel saga, with its seemingly unending series of setbacks and continued uncertainties, begs a crucial question: what incentives exist for the Air Force to get it right? That the program, along with numerous other nuclear modernization programs, was green-lighted to continue despite ever-increasing cost and schedule delays exposes a major flaw in U.S. nuclear weapons acquisition programs – they are too big to fail. The government, evidently, will always write a bigger check, will always move the goalposts, because the alternative is either failing to maintain the U.S. strategic deterrent or admitting that U.S. nuclear strategy and force structure is not as immutable and unquestionable as the public has been made to believe. In such a system of blank checks and industry lobbying, what incentivizes the Pentagon to ensure programs are as cost efficient as possible? The only mechanism for oversight and accountability is Congress. Congress must increase oversight of nuclear modernization programs like Sentinel to ensure a limit is placed on how much taxpayer money can be spent on failing programs in the name of national security.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) launches its annual assessment of the state of armaments, disarmament and international security

Washington, D.C. – June 16, 2025 – Nuclear weapons researchers at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) contributed to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)’s annual Yearbook, released today. Key findings of SIPRI Yearbook 2025 are that a dangerous new nuclear arms race is emerging at a time when arms control regimes are severely weakened.

“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.”

World’s nuclear arsenals being enlarged and upgraded  

Nearly all of the nine nuclear-armed states—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and Israel—continued intensive nuclear modernization programmes in 2024, upgrading existing  weapons and adding newer versions. 

Of the total global inventory of an estimated 12,241 warheads in January 2025, about 9614 were in military stockpiles for potential use (see the table below). 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. 

Since the end of the cold war, the gradual dismantlement of retired warheads by Russia and the USA has normally outstripped the deployment of new warheads, resulting in an overall year-on year decrease in the global inventory of nuclear weapons. This trend is likely to be reversed in the coming years, as the pace of dismantlement is slowing, while the deployment of new nuclear weapons is accelerating. 

Russia and the USA together possess around 90 per cent of all nuclear weapons. The sizes of their respective military stockpiles (i.e. useable warheads) seem to have stayed relatively stable in 2024 but both states are implementing extensive modernization programmes that could increase the size and diversity of their arsenals in the future. If no new agreement is reached to cap their stockpiles, the number of warheads they deploy on strategic missiles seems likely to increase after the bilateral 2010 Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START) expires in February 2026. 

The USA’s comprehensive nuclear modernization programme is progressing but in 2024 faced planning and funding challenges that could delay and significantly increase the cost of the new strategic arsenal. Moreover, the addition of new non-strategic nuclear weapons to the US arsenal will place further stress on the modernization programme. 

Russia’s nuclear modernization programme is also facing challenges that in 2024 included a test  failure and the further delay of the new Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and slower  than expected upgrades of other systems. Furthermore, an increase in Russia’s non-strategic nuclear warheads predicted by the USA in 2020 has so far not materialized. 

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ABOUT FAS

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) works to advance progress on a broad suite of contemporary issues where science, technology, and innovation policy can deliver transformative impact, and seeks to ensure that scientific and technical expertise have a seat at the policymaking table. Established in 1945 by scientists in response to the atomic bomb, FAS continues to bring scientific rigor and analysis to address contemporary challenges. More information about FAS work at fas.org.

As the United States overhauls nearly every element of its strategic nuclear forces, artificial intelligence is set to play a larger role—initially in early‑warning sensors and decision‑support tools, and likely in other mission areas. Improved detection could strengthen deterrence, but only if accompanying hazards—automation bias, model hallucinations, exploitable software vulnerabilities, and the risk of eroding assured second‑strike capability—are well managed. 

To ensure responsible AI integration, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Deterrence, Chemical, and Biological Defense Policy and Programs (OASD (ND-CBD)), the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (OUSD(P)), and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), should jointly develop a standardized AI risk-assessment framework guidance document, with implementation led by the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) and STRATCOM. Furthermore, DARPA and CDAO should join the Nuclear Weapons Council to ensure AI-related risks are systematically evaluated alongside traditional nuclear modernization decisions. 

Challenge and Opportunity 

The United States is replacing or modernizing nearly every component of its strategic nuclear forces, estimated to cost at least $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years. This includes its:

• Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)
• Ballistic missile submarines and their submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) 
• Strategic bombers, cruise missiles, and gravity bombs
• Nuclear warhead production and plutonium pit fabrication facilities 

Simultaneously, artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are rapidly advancing and being applied across the national security enterprise, including nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship and some components of command, control, and communications (NC3) systems, which encompass early warning, decision-making, and force deployment components.

The NNSA, responsible for stockpile stewardship, is increasingly integrating AI into its work. This includes using AI for advanced modeling and simulation of nuclear warheads. For example, by creating a digital twin of existing weapons systems to analyze aging and performance issues, as well as using AI to accelerate the lifecycle of nuclear weapons development. Furthermore, NNSA is leading some aspects of the safety testing and systematic evaluations of frontier AI models on behalf of the U.S. government, with a specific focus on assessing nuclear and radiological risk.

Within the NC3 architecture, a complex “system of systems” with over 200 components, simpler forms of AI are already being used in areas including early‑warning sensors, and may be applied to  decision‑support tools and other subsystems as confidence and capability grow. General Anthony J. Cotton—who leads STRATCOM, the combatant command that directs America’s global nuclear forces and their command‑and‑control network—told a 2024 conference that STRATCOM is “exploring all possible technologies, techniques, and methods” to modernize NC3. Advanced AI and data‑analytics tools, he said, can sharpen decision‑making, fuse nuclear and conventional operations, speed data‑sharing with allies, and thus strengthen deterrence. General Cotton added that research must also map the cascading risks, emergent behaviors, and unintended pathways that AI could introduce into nuclear decision processes.

Thus, from stockpile stewardship to NC3 systems, AI is likely to be integrated across multiple nuclear capabilities, some potentially stabilizing, others potentially highly destabilizing. For example, on the stabilizing effects, AI could enhance early warning systems by processing large volumes of satellite, radar, and other signals intelligence, thus providing more time to decision-makers. On the destabilizing side, the ability for AI to detect or track other countries’ nuclear forces could be destabilizing, triggering an expansionary arms race if countries doubt the credibility of their second-strike capability. Furthermore, countries may misinterpret each other’s nuclear deterrence doctrines or have no means of verification of human control of their nuclear weapons.

While several public research reports have been conducted on how AI integration into NC3 could upset the balance of strategic stability, less research has focused on the fundamental challenges with AI systems themselves that must be accounted for in any risk framework. Per the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework, several fundamental AI challenges at a technical level must be accounted for in the integration of AI into stockpile stewardship and NC3.

Not all AI applications within the nuclear enterprise carry the same level of risk. For example, using AI to model warhead aging in stockpile stewardship is largely internal to the Department of Energy (DOE) and involves less operational risk. Despite lower risk, there is still potential for an insufficiently secure model to lead to leaked technical data about nuclear weapons. 

However, integrating AI into decision support systems or early warning functions within NC3 introduces significantly higher stakes. These systems require time-sensitive, high-consequence judgments, and AI integration in this context raises serious concerns about issues including confabulations, human-AI interactions, and information security: 

• Confabulations: A phenomenon in which generative AI systems (GAI) systems generate and confidently present erroneous or false content in response to user inputs, or
  prompts. These phenomena are colloquially also referred to as “hallucinations” or “fabrications”, and could have particularly dangerous consequences in high-stakes settings. 

• Human-AI Interactions: Due to the complexity and human-like nature of GAI technology, humans may over-rely on GAI systems or may unjustifiably perceive GAI content to be of higher quality than that produced by other sources. This phenomenon is an example of automation bias or excessive deference to automated systems. This deference can lead to a shift from a human making the final decision (“human in the loop”), to a human merely observing AI generated decisions (“human on the loop”). Automation bias therefore risks exacerbating other risks of GAI systems as it can lead to humans maintaining insufficient oversight.

• Information Security: AI expands the cyberattack surface of NC3. Poisoned AI training data and tampered code can embed backdoors, and, once deployed, prompt‑injection or adversarial examples can hijack AI decision tools, distort early‑warning analytics, or leak secret data. The opacity of large AI models can let these exploits spread unnoticed, and as models become more complex, they will be harder to debug.

This is not an exhaustive list of issues with AI systems, however it highlights several key areas that must be managed. A risk framework must account for these distinctions and apply stricter oversight where system failure could have direct consequences for escalation or deterrence credibility. Without such a framework, it will be challenging to harness the benefits AI has to offer.

Plan of Action 

Recommendation 1. OASD (ND-CBD),  STRATCOM, DARPA, OUSD(P), and NNSA, should develop a standardized risk assessment framework guidance document to evaluate the integration of artificial intelligence into nuclear stockpile stewardship and NC3 systems. 

This framework would enable systematic evaluation of risks, including confabulations, human-AI configuration, and information security, across modernization efforts. The framework could assess the extent to which an AI model is prone to confabulations, involving performance evaluations (or “benchmarking”) under a wide range of realistic conditions. While there are public measurements for confabulations, it is essential to evaluate AI systems on data relevant to the deployment circumstances, which could involve highly sensitive military information.  

Additionally, the framework could assess human-AI configuration with specific focus on risks from automation bias and the degree of human oversight. For these tests, it is important to put the AI systems in contact with human operators in situations that are as close to real deployment as possible, for example when operators are tired, distracted, or under pressure. 

Finally, the framework could include assessments of information security under extreme conditions. This should include simulating comprehensive adversarial attacks (or “red-teaming”) to understand how the AI system and its human operators behave when subject to a range of known attacks on AI systems.

NNSA should be included in this development due to their mission ownership of stockpile stewardship and nuclear safety, and leadership in advanced modeling and simulation capabilities. DARPA should be included due to its role as the cutting edge research and development agency, extensive experience in AI red-teaming, and understanding of the AI vulnerabilities landscape. STRATCOM must be included as the operational commander of NC3 systems, to ensure the framework accounts for real-word needs and escalation risks. OASD (ND-CBD) should be involved given the office’s responsibilities to oversee nuclear modernization and coordinate across the interagency. The OUSD (P) should be included to provide strategic oversight and ensure the risk assessment aligns with broader defense policy objectives and international commitments.

Recommendation 2. CDAO should implement the Risk Assessment Framework with STRATCOM

While NNSA, DARPA, OASD (ND-CBD) and STRATCOM can jointly create the risk assessment framework, CDAO and STRATCOM should serve as the implementation leads for utilizing the framework. Given that the CDAO is already responsible for AI assurance, testing and evaluation, and algorithmic oversight, they would be well-positioned to work with relevant stakeholders to support implementation of the technical assessment. STRATCOM would have the strongest understanding of operational contexts with which to apply the framework. NNSA and DARPA therefore could advise on technical underpinnings with regards to AI of the framework, while the CDAO would prioritize operational governance and compliance, ensuring that there are clear risk assessments completed and understood when considering integration of AI into nuclear-related defense systems.

Recommendation 3. DARPA and CDAO should join the Nuclear Weapons Council 

Given their roles in the creation and implementation of the AI risk assessment framework, stakeholders from both DARPA and the CDAO should be incorporated into the Nuclear Weapons Council (NWC), either as full members or attendees to a subcommittee. As the NWC is the interagency body the DOE and the DoD responsible for sustaining and modernizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent, the NWC is responsible for endorsing military requirements, approving trade-offs, and ensuring alignment between DoD delivery systems and NNSA weapons. 

As AI capabilities become increasingly embedded in nuclear weapons stewardship, NC3 systems, and broader force modernization, the NWC must be equipped to evaluate associated risks and technological implications. Currently, the NWC is composed of senior officials from the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Department of Energy, including the NNSA. While these entities bring deep domain expertise in nuclear policy, military operations, and weapons production, the Council lacks additional representation focused on AI.

DARPA’s inclusion would ensure that early-stage technology developments and red-teaming insights are considered upstream in decision-making. Likewise, CDAO’s presence would provide continuity in AI assurance, testing, and digital system governance across operational defense components. Their participation would enhance the Council’s ability to address new categories of risk, such as model confabulation, automation bias, and adversarial manipulation of AI systems, that are not traditionally covered by existing nuclear stakeholders. By incorporating DARPA and CDAO, the NWC would be better positioned to make informed decisions that reflect both traditional nuclear considerations and the rapidly evolving technological landscape that increasingly shapes them.

Conclusion 

While AI is likely to be integrated into components of the U.S. nuclear enterprise, without a standardized initial approach to assessing and managing AI-specific risk, including confabulations, automation bias, and novel cybersecurity threats, this integration could undermine an effective deterrent. A risk assessment framework coordinated by OASD (ND-CBD), with STRATCOM, NNSA and DARPA, and implemented with support of the CDAO, could provide a starting point for NWC decisions and assessments of the alignment between DoD delivery system needs, the NNSA stockpile, and NC3 systems.

This memo was written by an AI Safety Policy Entrepreneurship Fellow over the course of a six-month, part-time program that supports individuals in advancing their policy ideas into practice. You can read more policy memos and learn about Policy Entrepreneurship Fellows here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the NWC have the authority to create a new subcommittee including DARPA and the CDAO?

Yes, NWC subordinate organizations or subcommittees are not codified in Title 10 USC §179, so the NWC has the flexibility to create, merge, or abolish organizations and subcommittees as needed.

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Are there existing regulations that the United States has declared with respect to AI integration into NC3?

Section 1638 of the FY2025 National Defense Authorization Act established a Statement of Policy emphasizing that any use of AI in support of strategic deterrence should not compromise, “the principle of requiring positive human actions in execution of decisions by the President with respect to the employment of nuclear weapons.” However, as this memo describes, AI presents further challenges outside of solely keeping a human in the loop in terms of decision-making.

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Washington, D.C. – May 6, 2025 – The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) today released “Nuclear Notebook: Russian Nuclear Weapons 2025,” its authoritative annual survey of Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The FAS Nuclear Notebook is considered the most reliable public source for information on global nuclear arsenals for all nine nuclear-armed states. FAS has played a critical role for almost 80 years to increase transparency and accountability over the world’s nuclear arsenals and to support policies that reduce the numbers and risks of their use.

This year’s report, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and by Taylor & Francis and available in full here, discusses the following takeaways:

• 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.
• Russia continues to modernize its nuclear triad, replacing Soviet-era weapons with newer types, but modernization of ICBMs and strategic bombers has been slow. The country’s efforts to develop the advanced Sarmat (RS-28 or SS-29) ICBM and the next-generation strategic bomber, PAK DA, have faced delays and setbacks.
• The submarine-based nuclear force continues its modernization with Borei-class submarines replacing older types. A portion of Russian ballistic missile submarines are at sea at any given time on strategic deterrent patrols. Significant nuclear warhead and missile storage upgrades are underway at the Pacific and Northern fleet bases.
• Russia continues modernizing and emphasizing its nonstrategic  nuclear forces. This includes land- and sea-based dual-capable missiles and tactical aircraft. Despite modernization of launchers, the number of warheads assigned to those launchers has remained relatively stable. Russia held several high-profile exercises with its nonstrategic forces in 2024, and the authors describe upgrades to a suspected nuclear storage depot in Belarus.
• Russia has maintained its policy of nuclear deterrence, emphasizing the strategic importance of its nuclear arsenal in its military doctrine. Updates to public policy documents describe a broader range of scenarios for potential use of nuclear weapons but it is unknown to what extent this is reflected in changes to military plans.
  

FAS Nuclear Experts and Previous Issues of Nuclear Notebook

The FAS Nuclear Notebook, co-authored by Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns, and Mackenzie Knight, is published bi-monthly in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The first Nuclear Notebook was published in 1987. FAS, formed in 1945 by the scientists who developed the first U.S. nuclear weapon, has worked since to increase nuclear transparency, reduce nuclear risks, and advocate for responsible reductions of nuclear arsenal and their role.

This latest issue on Russia’s nuclear weapons comes after the release of Nuclear Notebook: Chinese Nuclear Weapons 2025 and will be followed in June by Nuclear Notebook: French Nuclear Weapons 2025. More research available at FAS’s Nuclear Information Project.


The Federation of American Scientists’ work on nuclear transparency would not be possible without generous support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Jubitz Family Foundation, the New-Land Foundation, Ploughshares, the Prospect Hill Foundation, and individual donors.

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ABOUT FAS

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) works to advance progress on a broad suite of contemporary issues where science, technology, and innovation policy can deliver transformative impact, and seeks to ensure that scientific and technical expertise have a seat at the policymaking table. Established in 1945 by scientists in response to the atomic bomb, FAS continues to bring scientific rigor and analysis to address contemporary challenges. More information about FAS work at fas.org.