Arms Sales Monitoring Project
My name is Matt Schroeder and I am the manager of the FAS’ Arms Sales Monitoring Project (ASMP). Since 1991, the ASMP has worked to increase transparency, accountability and restraint in the arms trade, and to end the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. To that end, we do original research on arms trade policy issues, maintain the largest free online source of data and analysis on U.S. arms trade policies and programs, and advise policymakers, the media, and civil society on arms trade issues.
I hail from Holland, Michigan (aka God’s Country) but have lived on the East Coast for nearly a decade. I spent five years in New York City, where I worked for a couple of NGOs and earned a master’s degree in international security policy from Columbia University. I moved to DC in 2002, but still consider myself a New Yorker.
I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts (and reading your reactions to my thoughts) on the critically important but oft-ignored issues surrounding the arms trade. Defense trade controls, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, and small arms/light weapons trafficking are my current foci, but many other issues will undoubtedly come up.
The SIPRI chapter describes the nuclear weapon modernization programs underway in each nuclear-armed state and provides estimates for how many nuclear warheads each country possesses.
FAS researchers Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda with the Nuclear Information Project write in the new SIPRI Yearbook 2024, released today.
The total number of U.S. nuclear warheads are now estimated to include 1,770 deployed warheads, 1,938 reserved for operational forces. An additional 1,336 retired warheads are awaiting dismantlement, for a total inventory of 5,044 warheads.
A military depot in central Belarus has recently been upgraded with additional security perimeters and an access point that indicate it could be intended for housing Russian nuclear warheads for Belarus’ Russia-supplied Iskander missile launchers.