Over the weekend, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) revealed how many nukes America is sitting on and how many it dismantled last year in a post on its website.
According to the declassified information, the U.S. had 3,748 nukes in the stockpile as of September 2023. It also said that it had dismantled 69 of the world-ending weapons. This is the first time the U.S. federal government has revealed how many nukes it’s sitting on since October of 2021, when the number was 3,713.
Nuclear tensions are on the rise across the world. Russia, the U.S., and China are working on new and fancier nuclear weapons, North Korea has—by best estimates—around 50 nuclear weapons, and the U.S. has repeatedly said it’s afraid Iran will soon have nukes of its own. The U.S. is set to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building new ICBM silos in America’s heartland and Russia has done a lot of very public drills with its weapons in the past few years.
Despite these grim portents, the number of nuclear weapons in the world is much lower now than it was at its peak during the 1980s. In 1985 there were 61,662 nuclear weapons in the world. Most of them belonged to the U.S. and Russia. Over the next few decades, both sides pulled back from the brink and began to dismantle their doomsday machines.
A complex series of treaties between Russia and the U.S. facilitated the drawdown. Both sides dismantled thousands of weapons. For a while, the U.S. was breaking apart Russian missiles and using the uranium inside to fuel power plants. Those sustained efforts have brought the global stockpile down to around 12,121.
But the old treaties are failing. Russia pulled out of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 2023. Later that year it suspended its participation in New START, which put a cap on deployed warheads and opened up both America and Russia to inspections from the other side.
America’s stockpile has remained steady over the last few years. Every year the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) asks the Department of Energy to declassify the numbers and the DOE has a habit of refusing. In 2023 it told the FAS it did not “believe that it is in the best interest of the United States to declassify the size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, the number of weapons dismantled, or the number of weapons awaiting dismantlement as of the end of FY 2021 at this time.”
It said the same thing in February of 2024. But something shifted and the numbers finally came loose. From 1994 to 2023, the U.S. said it had dismantled a total of 12,088 warheads. But that number gets smaller as the years go on. The U.S. busted up 648 nukes in 2008, 239 in 2013, and 184 in 2020.
69 is a nice little number of dismantled nukes. But it’s also tiny, the first time that the U.S. has dismantled fewer than 100 nukes in the past 30 years.
