In 2021, about 13,000 nuclear warheads existed worldwide, according to the Arms Control Association, www.armscontrol.org.
I’m showing on the TV screen an image of how many nuclear weapons are owned by each of the nine nations that have nuclear weapons. About 90% of these belong to the United States and Russia.
SEE THIS IMAGE:
Nine nations’ stockpiles of nuclear weapons
After George W. Bush and Donald Trump destroyed several important treaties that limited nuclear weapons of the U.S. and Russia, the New START Treaty was practically the only one left between the U.S. and Russia. Trump was allowing New START to expire too, but in January 2021 Joe Biden extended it for 5 years. New START caps each country at 1,550 strategic deployed warheads. See information at this link: the provisions of the New START agreement
The numbers of deployed warheads in both Russia and the U.S. are below New START’s limit of 1,550 each. Each nation also has a few thousand missiles not currently ready to launch.
Russia (6,257 total) has 1,458 ready-to-launch: These strategic nuclear warheads are deployed on 527 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers.
The United States (5,550 total) has 1,389 ready-to-launch: These strategic nuclear warheads are deployed on 665 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers. The U.S. also has an estimated 100 B-61 nuclear gravity bombs that are forward-deployed at six NATO bases in five European countries.
While Russia and the U.S. each has about 1,400, the other 7 nations have far fewer: China has 350, France 290, the UK 225, Pakistan 165, India 156, Israel 90, and North Korea 50.
All together those 7 nations have only about 10% of the world’s deployed nuclear weapons, while 90% are owned by the U.S. and Russia.
In 2019 the U.S. spent very nearly as much on nuclear weapons as ALL OTHER nations combined.
In 2019, the 9 nations that have nuclear weapons spent a total of $72.9 BILLION on them.
The U.S. spent about as much as ALL OF THE OTHER 8 nations combined.
9 nations’ spending on nuclear weapons in 2019
In 2019 the nine nations that have nuclear weapons spent $72.9 billion on them, and the U.S. spent about half of that total. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN, www.icanw.org) issued a report about this in May 2020. You can download it from their website, www.icanw.org. The direct link to that report is: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/ican/pages/1549/attachments/original/1589365383/ICAN-Enough-is-Enough-Global-Nuclear-Weapons-Spending-2020-published-13052020.pdf?1589365383
