Global Nuclear Warhead Stockpiles Growing Again

While nuclear powers such as the United States and France are not thought to have increased their arsenal from Jan 2022 to Jan 2023, there has been an overall increase in the number of stockpiled nuclear warheads in this period, globally.

As Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, chiefly China, but also Russia, North Korea, Pakistan and India have led to this uptick, expanding the number of the weapons which they have at their disposal – be it stored or already deployed – by a combined total of 86.

As this chart illustrates, this continues a trend which began in 2018, ending a long cooldown period dating back to the late 80’s when there were more than 64,000 stockpiled worldwide.

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As summarized by SIPRI, “Global reductions of operational warheads appear to have stalled, and their numbers are rising again. At the same time, both the USA and Russia have extensive and expensive programs under way to replace and modernize their nuclear warheads, their missile, aircraft and submarine delivery systems, and their nuclear weapon production facilities”.