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By Hans M. Kristensen
The world’s nuclear weapon states possess an estimated 22,600 nuclear weapons, of which more than 7,500 are deployed. This and much more according to a chapter I co-authored in the latest yearbook from the Swedish International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Copyright prevents us from making a copy of the chapter available here, but we’re allowed to share a PDF-copy with individual contacts. Otherwise a brief summary is available here. The estimates are similar to the ones I update on the FAS web site, with slight differences due to production time and counting categories, and are based on the analysis I do with Robert Norris in the Nuclear Notebook in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
This publication was made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York and Ploughshares Fund. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
Without information, without factual information, you can’t act. You can’t relate to the world you live in. And so it’s super important for us to be able to monitor what’s happening around the world, analyze the material, and translate it into something that different audiences can understand.
Russia currently maintains nearly 5,460 nuclear warheads, with an estimated 1,718 deployed. This represents a slight decrease in total warheads from previous years but still positions Russia as the world’s largest nuclear power alongside the United States.
Nuclear weapons budgeting is like agreeing to buying a house without knowing the sales price, the mortgage rate, or the monthly payment.
The United States Air Force has forward deployed about one-third of its B-2 stealth bombers to Diego Garcia, or about half the B-2s considered fully operational at any given time.