On July 20, the United States revealed that it has 3,748 nuclear warheads in its military stockpile. These are weapons that are ready to use, with estimated yields that range from 8 kilotons to more than 300 kilotons. Hiroshima, by comparison, was destroyed with one 20-kiloton bomb.
Declassifying the total number of warheads for the first time since 2021, the Biden Administration called its decision an act of transparency “important to nonproliferation and disarmament efforts.”
But the revelation comes amid a new arms race that the United States is helping to fuel with a $1.7 trillion investment in so-called modernization, replacing missiles, airplanes, and submarines, while upgrading 3,750 existing warheads and creating new ones for the first time in three decades.
The revelation comes amid a new arms race that the United States is helping to fuel with a $1.7 trillion investment in so-called modernization.
The government did not reveal details of the stockpile, but roughly half—some 1,770 warheads—are armed and deployed on missiles, submarines, and bombers, according to the Nuclear Information Project, a division of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which has tracked nuclear capabilities worldwide for years. The FAS, called “one of the most widely sourced resources for nuclear warhead counts” by The Washington Post, reports that 400 of the deployed weapons are installed on land-based intercontinental missiles, 970 on submarine missiles, 300 are kept at two Air Force bases in the United States (to be increased to five , and 100 are stored in Europe.
The FAS estimates that another 1,978 warheads are armed and ready. The government describes this group as available “for possible deployment within a short time frame.”
A third group, estimated by the FAS at 1,330 warheads, are labeled “inactive” by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the federal agency responsible for producing and maintaining nuclear weapons. They are stored and are considered “non-operational” with tritium bottles removed. Tritium is the gas that creates fusion when squirted into an exploding plutonium pit, resulting in a powerful thermonuclear bomb.
Declassifying stockpile numbers has been a unilateral geopolitical calculation made erratically by U.S. Presidents. In 2010, the Obama Administration, for the first time, declassified the entire history of the U.S. nuclear stockpile size, in part to show that the United States was abiding by the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty and to encourage other nuclear powers to follow suit. So far, that strategy has failed, the FAS reports. Stockpiles are actually increasing in China, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom.
The FAS estimates that nine countries possess more than 12,100 warheads, 2,100 of which are mounted on ballistic missiles and “are on high alert, ready for use on short notice.” Overall, the FAS reports, the number of warheads assigned to operational forces “[i]s increasing once again,” although its estimates “come with significant uncertainty” because most nuclear powers keep their stockpiles secret.
Defense hawks, including former President Donald Trump, argue that releasing stockpile details gives enemies vital information. But advocates say otherwise. Transparency “reduces chances of misperception and removes another’s perceived need to build more under an impression that it is ‘behind’ the other,” John Tierney, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, tells The Progressive.
“Although overtures inviting discussions have been offered by the United States, neither Russia nor China have engaged, at least for now,” Tierney says. “The U.S. is reintroducing a practice halted by Trump. In the past, such leadership has eventually resulted in other countries following suit. It has the prospect of lowering temperatures and may lead to at least a slight opening toward limited dialogue—a start.”
In its declassification announcement, the Biden Administration noted that the U.S. stockpile is 88 percent smaller than it was in 1967, at the height of the Cold War, when the United States had 31,255 warheads. Between 1994 and 2023, the U.S. dismantled 12,088 warheads. Another 2,000 are “retired” and are scheduled for dismantlement. They have been removed from their delivery platforms and are not functional, according to the NNSA.
Dismantling warheads is an important signal of U.S. intentions, Hans Kristensen, the director of the FAS Nuclear Information Project, tells The Progressive. “It shows how much they are eating away at this big pool of warheads, and not just storing them in some garage somewhere. It serves many purposes, both as a sort of reassurance and credibility. It really helps take away the fuel in conspiracy theories.”
At the same time, he says, revealing the size of the U.S. stockpile is a form of deterrence. “You have to convince adversaries and also allies that you have stuff that works.”
The dramatic reduction in the size of the U.S. stockpile was caused primarily by the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. But nuclear weapons have also become more technically efficient, Kristensen says. “You don’t need as many to do the job.” Thousands of nuclear weapons have also “aged out.” A third factor is the replacement of nuclear bombs with conventional weapons. “We aimed nukes at everything back in those days. Today, in the U.S. arsenal, they have almost entirely moved away from nonstrategic [tactical] nuclear weapons.”
Hans M. Kristensen & Matt Korda, 2019
The FAS reports that the United States has nuclear weapons in twenty-four geographical locations in eleven states and five European countries. The number of locations will increase over the next decade as nuclear storage capacity is added to three U.S. bomber bases.
The location with the greatest number of nuclear weapons, 2,485, is the Kirtland Underground Munitions and Maintenance Storage Complex south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Most of its weapons are retired and awaiting dismantling at the Pantex Plant in Carson County, Texas.
Washington State, home of the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific and the ballistic missile submarines at Naval Submarine Base Kitsap, holds 1,620 warheads. The submarines operating from this base carry more deployed nuclear weapons than any other base in the United States, the FAS reports.
According to the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, in a summary of the New Start Treaty, the United States has deployed nuclear warheads at these locations:
450 warheads are mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles in silos in Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Montana, and North Dakota.
1,100 warheads are deployed on fourteen Ohio-class submarines each carrying up to twenty-four Trident missiles, which themselves are capable of carrying up to five warheads. Six are based at Kings Bay, Georgia, and eight are based in Silverdale, Washington.
300 are at bomber bases in the United States—200 at the Minot, North Dakota, Air Force base, and 100 at Whiteman Air Force Base in Johnson County, Missouri. The Defense Department has announced that three more bases are being expanded for the new B21 bombers—Barksdale AFB, in Louisiana, Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota, and Dyess AFB in Texas.
100 tactical bombs are currently stored in underground vaults in five NATO countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
The U.S stockpile was created soon after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ended World War II, as Los Alamos continued to hand-fashion new bombs demanded by the military.
The U.S stockpile was created soon after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ended World War II, as Los Alamos continued to hand-fashion new bombs demanded by the military. In November 1945 Senator Edwin Johnson, Democrat of Colorado, urged “vision and guts and plenty of bombs [to] compel mankind to adopt a policy of lasting peace or be burned to a crisp.” By 1946 the United States had nine bombs and was producing two a month. By 1949 when the Russians exploded their first bomb, the United States had 100, according to a 1995 history compiled by The Denver Post.
“The stockpile we have (composition, capabilities, numbers) is the product of eighty years of reacting, thinking, arguing, posturing, planning,” Kristensen tells The Progressive. “Although most people tend to say we have them to deter adversaries, the reality is much more complex. While part is about trying to deter adversaries from using nukes in the first place, most of the requirements actually come from what happens AFTER deterrence has failed: what do you have to destroy to achieve which objectives to win the war? And that’s where there are several schools of thought.”