Nuclear weapons analysts estimate that the world’s nine nuclear states—China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States—have around 13,000 nuclear warheads in total.
Since Russia first invaded Ukraine nearly three weeks ago, the threat of nuclear weapon use has risen.
“We know which countries have nuclear weapons, but we don’t necessarily know how many nuclear weapons they have; Israel, for instance, does not publicly acknowledge its program,” Anne Harrington, a senior lecturer in international relations at Cardiff University in the U.K., told Live Science. “The number of nuclear weapons China has is also a major subject of debate.”
“Although it’s difficult to know definitively exactly how nuclear arsenals are changing, we assess that China, India, North Korea, Pakistan and the United Kingdom, as well as possibly Russia, are all increasing the number of nuclear weapons in their military stockpiles,” said Matt Korda, a senior research associate and project manager for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
HOW POWERFUL ARE THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS OUT THERE? Nuclear weapons vary in their destructive power. In the United States’ current nuclear arsenal, the most powerful bomb is the B83, which has a maximum yield of 1.2 megatons, making it 60 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. According to the Nuclear Weapon Archive, 650 B83s are in “active service.”
Strategic weapons can “reach from Moscow to Washington, D.C., while nonstrategic, tactical nuclear weapons have shorter ranges,” said Samuel Hickey, a research analyst at the nonprofit Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
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