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.
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.
Oppenheimer may win big at the Oscars as a story about the past; unfortunately, nuclear weapons are still an urgent threat to humanity.
Detonating a nuclear weapon in space would not only damage U.S. assets but those of all countries, including Russia. It would set back the use of space for multiple purposes – peaceful and otherwise – by decades.
Satellite images show that the Navy has begun construction of a new nuclear weapons storage and handling facility at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
Russia is in the midst of a decades-long nuclear force modernization program intended to replace Soviet-era missiles, aircraft, and submarines with new systems.
The Sentinel program has been plagued with cost increases, flawed assumptions, and misleading arguments from the beginning; this most recent overrun demands hawk-eyed scrutiny of the program’s next steps.