Over the weekend, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) revealed how many nukes the US has and how many it destroyed last year in a post on its website.
According to declassified information, the US had 3,748 nukes in stock as of September 2023. It also claimed to have dismantled 69 weapons of mass destruction. It’s the first time the US federal government has revealed how many nukes it has sitting on it since October 2021, when the number was 3,713.
Nuclear tensions are on the rise around the world. Russia, the US, and China are working on new and more interesting nuclear weapons, North Korea has—at best estimates—about 50 nuclear weapons, and the US has repeatedly said it fears Iran will have nukes of its own. soon. The US will spend hundreds of billions of dollars building new ICBM silos in America’s heartland and Russia has conducted several civilian tests of its weapons in the past few years.
Despite these tragic surprises, the number of nuclear weapons in the world is much lower now than it was at its peak in the mid-1980s. In 1985 there were 61,662 nuclear weapons in the world. Most of them were from the US and Russia. Over the next few decades, both sides pulled back from the brink and began dismantling their doomsday machines.
A complex series of agreements between Russia and the US helped the decline. Both sides scattered thousands of weapons. For a while, the US was taking apart Russian missiles and using the uranium inside to fuel power plants. Those ongoing efforts have reduced the global stock to about 12,121.
But old agreements fail. Russia withdrew from the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 2023. Later that year it suspended its participation in New START, which limited the number of warheads used and opened the door for the United States and Russia to test each other.
US stocks have remained strong over the past few years. Every year the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) asks the Department of Energy to break down the numbers and the DOE has a habit of refusing. In 2023 it told the FAS that it “does not believe it is in the best interests of the United States to share the size of the US nuclear stockpile, the number of weapons dismantled, or the number of weapons awaiting dismantling until the end of FY 2021 at this time.”
It says the same thing in February of 2024. But something changed and the numbers ended up being loose. From 1994 to 2023, the US claimed to have dismantled a total of 12,088 warheads. But that number is getting smaller as the years go by. The US detonated 648 nukes in 2008, 239 in 2013, and 184 in 2020.
69 is a pretty small number of nukes dismantled. But it’s also small, the first time the US has dismantled fewer than 100 nukes in 30 years.
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