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.
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.
The Indian government announced yesterday that it had conducted the first flight test of its Agni-5 ballistic missile “with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-Entry Vehicle (MIRV) technology.
While many are rightly concerned about Russia’s development of new nuclear-capable systems, fears of substantial nuclear increase may be overblown.
Despite modernization of Russian nuclear forces and warnings about an increase of especially shorter-range non-strategic warheads, we do not yet see such an increase as far as open sources indicate.