President Barack Obama, here shown speaking to the United Nations in September, is seeking to delay a UN Resolution calling for De-Alerting Nuclear Forces. . By Hans M. Kristensen The Obama administration has asked four countries to postpone a resolution at the United Nations calling for reducing the alert-level of nuclear weapons. The intervention apparently […]
Retirement of the W62 warhead, seen here at Warren Air Force Base, has been been delayed. . By Hans M. Kristensen The Pentagon has missed the deadline set by the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review for the retirement of the W62 nuclear warhead. Retirement of the warhead, which arms a portion of the 450 U.S. Minuteman […]
The mysterious DF-41 missile did not appear at the Chinese National Day parade on October 1st, but the Chinese Ministry of National Defense says the DF-31A did. But did it, or was it in fact the DF-31? . By Hans M. Kristensen The military parade at China’s 60th National Day celebration last week was widely […]
by: Alicia Godsberg This past Thursday and Friday marked the 6th bi-annual Article XIV Conference, the Conference on Facilitating the Entry Into Force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). This year’s conference was held at the United Nations in New York and was met with a measure of cautious optimism – most states […]
On Friday, President Obama announced that the United States knows of a new, undeclared, and hidden underground gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment facility in Iran, near the city of Qom. Some news reports suggest that 3000 centrifuges will be housed there. How significant is this discovery? Well, just in time, our crack FAS researcher, Ivanka Barzashka, has […]
President Obama has once again pushed nuclear weapons, and his vision for a world free of nuclear weapons, to the center of the world’s stage with his speech yesterday before the United Nations’ General Assembly and his chairing of the United Nations’ Security Council meeting this morning. He reiterated his goal of ratifying the Comprehensive […]
A high-security weapons storage area northwest of Karachi appears to be a potential nuclear weapons storage site. (click image to download larger version) By Hans M. Kristensen Pakistan’s nuclear weapons stockpile now includes an estimated 70-90 nuclear warheads, according to the latest Nuclear Notebook published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The estimate is […]
by Ivan Oelrich Today is the sixty-fourth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, which was one of those rare events that divides human history into a before and an after. That day was the beginning of the nuclear age. There is nothing special about sixty-four, not like a fiftieth or a centenary. But, years […]
by Alicia Godsberg Yesterday’s Washington Post had another article[1] in the ongoing saga of W76 warhead refurbishment Life Extension Program (LEP) and Fogbank – a material that, according to open sources, is an intermediary material between the primary and secondary of a nuclear weapon that is “crucial” to the weapon reaching its designed yield.[2] The […]
The French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle with air wing on deck. By Hans M. Kristensen France no longer deploys nuclear weapons on its aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle under normal circumstances but stores the weapons on land, according to French officials. President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in March 2008 that France “could and should […]
Retirement of the W62 warhead will be completed in 2009. By Hans M. Kristensen The U.S. State Department has confirmed the estimate made by FAS on this blog in February that the United States had already reached the limit of 2,200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads set by the 2002 Moscow Treaty. The confirmation occurred […]
by Alicia Godsberg There is cause for cautious optimism after Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed their START follow-on Joint Understanding in Moscow last Monday – the goal of completing a legally binding bilateral nuclear disarmament agreement with verification measures is preferable to letting START expire without an agreement or without one that keeps some sort […]