US declassifies number of its strategic nuclear warheads

The United States has 3,748 nuclear warheads suitable for equipping strategic forces, primarily missiles, according to the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) as of September 2023. This is the first publication of information on the state of the American nuclear arsenal since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The NNSA last released data in October 2021. The number of strategic nuclear warheads has been steadily declining since 1989, the year the agency designated the end of the Cold War. At that time, the U.S. had 22,217 warheads. The peak was in 1967, when the U.S. arsenal numbered 31,255 nuclear warheads (an 88% reduction by 2023).

By comparison, the USSR had four times fewer warheads at that time, approximately 8.4 thousand. The Soviet Union first overtook the United States in 1976, and by the end of the Cold War it had reached a peak of 40.2 thousand warheads.

The United States has dismantled 12,088 charges from the early 1990s to 2023, the NNSA said. Another 2,000 or so have been removed from service and are awaiting dismantling.

In the spring of 2023, the State Department reported that the United States had 1,419 deployed nuclear warheads on 662 platforms: intercontinental ballistic missiles, heavy bombers, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. At the same time, the State Department accused Russia of ceasing to disclose information about its nuclear arsenal.

In January 2023, Russia, according to figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), had about 4,500 nuclear warheads in its arsenal.

Russia and the United States remain, according to SIPRI, the leaders in nuclear arsenal size, with 90% of the world's total stockpile of such weapons of mass destruction. China is in third place with 410 warheads, followed by France with 290 and the United Kingdom with 225. Pakistan (170), India (164), Israel (90) and the DPRK (30) also possess nuclear warheads.

The US has almost no tactical nuclear weapons left, the NNSA noted, 90% of the stockpiles have been destroyed since the early 1990s. Russia is the world's largest holder of tactical nuclear charges - more than a third of the total number of 4.5 thousand warheads. They can be loaded onto aerial bombs or cruise missiles, such as the Iskander. In early July, the US announced that it was going to deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in Germany in 2026. In March, Russia transferred tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, NATO representatives reported .

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