As Tensions Rise Globally, Experts Call for More Nuclear Transparency

In the world of nuclear weapons, there are many secrets; warhead designs, infrastructure security details, historical vulnerabilities and mishaps, and the locations of nuclear-armed submarines are all highly classified. But what is not secret — at least not in the United States — is the total number of weapons that make up the country’s nuclear stockpile.

Although not closely examined by the public, the extraordinary lethality, incalculable costs in terms of financial and natural resources, and potential stakes for human life and the environment bring into focus the importance of understanding the role nuclear weapons play in the world today. The painful reality of what nuclear weapons do when they are used is recounted as the world marks 79 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9.

Since 1993, when a large body of historical “vital nuclear information” was declassified by the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense, the annual number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal has largely been in the public domain. But the publication of that information, like all other policy related to nuclear weapons, largely depends on the president in office. This year, like other election years, both the transparency around the country’s nuclear arsenal, as well as its size, is again up for debate.

In 2010, during the Obama administration, additional stockpile information was declassified, including the total number of nuclear weapons the U.S. held and the number of warheads slated for dismantlement, further increasing U.S. nuclear transparency. But Donald Trump’s administration withheld data on the size of the U.S. stockpile, and requests for information were denied. The Biden administration declassified and updated those numbers again in 2021, only to withhold them again for three years until this July, when the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) published updated nuclear stockpile numbers on its website.

As of 2023, the U.S. military stockpile contained 3,748 nuclear weapons, a number that has fallen sharply since the mid-1960s when the country had over 31,000 nuclear weapons. These figures and other related information are regularly requested by analysts with the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan think tank. Project Director Hans Kristensen and his team monitor, analyze and publish key nuclear weapons information about the U.S. and the other eight nuclear-armed nations.

FAS nuclear weapons reports are updated and revised on a continuous basis, and have been published as the Nuclear Notebook by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987. Considered a trusted source of publicly available information, it has become the go-to site for the most accurate, up-to-date compilation of nuclear figures.

According to FAS estimates, as of May 2024, the United States had a total inventory of 5,044 nuclear warheads. This includes all nuclear weapons — both strategic and nonstrategic, and those that are deployed, held in reserve or “retired weapons awaiting dismantlement.” Strategic nuclear weapons generally refer to long-range weapons intended to target cities or key infrastructure while nonstrategic (sometimes called “tactical”) nuclear weapons may be shorter range so-called “battlefield” nuclear weapons. Analysts dispute the usefulness of these terms as nonstrategic weapons are sometimes erroneously believed to be smaller, but this is not necessarily true. Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis once said, “I don’t think there is any such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon.’ Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game-changer.”

Kristensen told Truthout that while the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile has dropped dramatically, today the U.S. possesses an “enormously capable” nuclear and nonnuclear strike force with “enhanced capabilities that improve effectiveness and flexibility.” Increased accuracy and flexibility have been tradeoffs for reducing the numbers of warheads, making today’s U.S. nuclear arsenal more “capable” than 25 years ago, Kristensen said. “People don’t remember that, don’t know that, and don’t think about it.”

Nuclear transparency … “can help limit mistrust and worst-case scenario planning that can fuel arms races.”

According to Kristensen, the United States is by far the most transparent country in sharing its nuclear stockpile numbers, with France being the second-most transparent. Recently, the U.K. has reduced its level of transparency, citing a government policy of not disclosing operational stockpile, deployed warhead or deployed missile numbers. Kristensen says that China, Russia, India and Pakistan each lack transparency in their own ways. Despite Russia’s propensity for bravado, it reveals very few concrete figures. Kristensen told Truthout he has been told by NATO officials that the FAS estimate of the Russian nuclear stockpile is “the best unclassified out there” and has been used to brief the UN secretary general.

In recent years, as it develops and expands its nuclear arsenal, China has become somewhat less secretive about its weapons and infrastructure, Kristensen told Truthout. Israel, he says, is a “black box, very opaque.” The world’s most recently nuclear-capable nation, North Korea, is what Kristensen calls “propaganda transparent,” boasting loudly about growing nuclear capabilities in the hopes of garnering attention and creating fear.

The Argument for Transparency

In July, FAS published an article by Kristensen examining the NNSA’s declassification of updated stockpile information. The decision to do so, he wrote, was “consistent with America’s stated commitment to nuclear transparency,” and he called on the other eight nuclear states to do the same.

While the Trump administration demonstrated that it was against U.S. nuclear transparency, especially if Russia and China do not follow suit, Kristensen says that reasoning amounts to a zero-sum assessment. Nuclear transparency can demonstrate that the U.S. isn’t secretly building up its arsenal, he says, and “can help limit mistrust and worst-case scenario planning that can fuel arms races.”

Furthermore, transparency can help diplomats in treaty discussions as they push other countries to offer more information about their own arsenals. “There’s nothing worse than having a policy where you claim to be transparent and then you keep secret the nuclear weapons in your stockpile,” Kristensen told Truthout.

After attending the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons preparatory committee in July, Tytti Erästö, a senior weapons of mass destruction researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said the U.S. “wins points” by touting its own transparency, but added that most nonnuclear weapons states are more interested in seeing concrete steps toward disarmament and progress in nuclear weapons reductions. Still, she recognizes the value of stockpile transparency. “I think it’s important for the U.S. to uphold that kind of norm that nuclear weapons states should at least be transparent about what they have,” Erästö told Truthout.

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, with potential for another Trump term, nuclear experts are analyzing what would likely be an extreme shift in nuclear weapons policy based on Project 2025 proposals.

She added that the transparency of nuclear stockpile numbers helps people understand risks, makes it possible to measure progress in stockpile reduction, and can serve as a basis for negotiations. SIPRI publishes a summary of FAS nuclear findings in its annual yearbook.

Transparency also encourages broader, more open interagency internal discussions by staff and officials who may have varying levels of security clearance. It facilitates debate on matters of nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, the management of nuclear weapons, and other issues.

The public also deserves to know about stockpile numbers, given that the nuclear weapons under discussion could potentially end life on Earth.

Alicia Sanders-Zakre, policy and research coordinator with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, told Truthout, “The general public is not always aware of the massive nuclear stockpiles that nine countries still hold today — or that six countries [Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and Belarus] host other countries’ nuclear weapons on their territories.”

“Communicating independent nuclear warhead estimates,” Sanders-Zakre told Truthout in an email, “can spur outrage that these governments are choosing to risk global annihilation by maintaining and upgrading their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, with little to no input from their citizens.”

“Armed with this information,” Sanders-Zakre says, “activists can pressure their governments to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and eliminate their nuclear stockpiles or remove foreign nuclear weapons from their territories.” Adopted with support by 122 countries in 2017, the TPNW prohibits all aspects of nuclear weapons and calls for victim assistance and environmental remediation. At least 70 countries have ratified the treaty. As the Biden’s administration lapse in sharing stockpile numbers showed, just because information is declassified in a given year, doesn’t mean it will be in subsequent years, Kristensen noted. Declassification is a joint decision made annually by the Department of Energy and Department of Defense. Kristensen told Truthout that as far as he knows, FAS is the only organization that regularly requests this information.

FAS nuclear publications are based on an “enormous pool of different resources” — everything from declassified documents, news articles, briefings, interviews, quiet conversations with officials, treaty information, as well as open-source capabilities such as satellite imagery, aircraft and ship tracking, and military training exercise information. They even rely on the wild card of social media, which can sometimes prove to be a worthwhile lead, or may be disinformation or just plain wrong.

How Long Does It Take to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb?

Also important for transparency, Kristensen says, is the number and rate at which nuclear weapons are dismantled. Each year, FAS asks the U.S. government how many weapons are being dismantled. Nuclear weapons that have been retired and slated for removal from the stockpile are dismantled at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, the primary facility for assembling and disassembling nuclear weapons. Kristensen explained that the rate of dismantlement depends on how busy Pantex teams are with warhead life extension and reproduction programs. Other factors that can impact nuclear weapons-related work include the climate crisis and its associated symptoms; that includes flooding or massive wildfires like the one that burned just three miles from Pantex in February.

This year, agreement on an exact number of weapons “currently retired and awaiting dismantlement” was not released, Kristensen said, but it was reported to be “approximately 2,000.” The number may be closer to 1,500, he told Truthout. According to the NNSA, in 2023, only 69 retired warheads were dismantled, a record low over the past 30 years (since 1994), as life extension takes priority over dismantlement. Besides Pantex, the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile is supported by facilities in California, New Mexico, South Carolina, Missouri, and elsewhere.

A Return to Chaos, Confusion and Uncertainty

Because the decision of how much nuclear information to declassify can change year to year, the future of U.S. nuclear transparency is uncertain. Kristensen predicted that a Kamala Harris presidency would likely be marked by a continued willingness to declassify and continue broad outline policies of the Biden administration. If Donald Trump were to become president, he expects more unpredictability as well as resources and efforts wasted on “nuclear chest thumping.”

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, with potential for another Trump term, nuclear experts are analyzing what would likely be an extreme shift in nuclear weapons policy based on Project 2025 proposals. These include calling for the expansion of the nuclear arsenal, an acceleration of the controversial Sentinel program to replace U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, increased plutonium pit production and a willingness to resume explosive nuclear testing.

The resumption of explosive nuclear testing by the U.S. would not only violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the U.S. signed but has not yet ratified, but would also almost certainly lead to renewed testing by other countries. Furthermore, to resume nuclear explosive testing would be met with global outrage including from hibakusha (nuclear survivors) in Japan and other places where nuclear weapons development and testing has taken a heavy toll on human health and the environment.

Kristensen calls Project 2025 a “dial-back to the 1980s,” adding, “It’s even worse than that because they want to reduce government oversight and privatize more than I think is healthy.” There already exists a high degree of privatization in the nuclear enterprise, he says, pointing out that the national labs that produce nuclear weapons are run by companies and universities.

Kristensen calls Project 2025’s stated nuclear goals “ridiculous,” saying that it pretends it can do magic with the current capacity as if “you can just say you want to increase then ‘kaboom!’ you increase.” But without an industrial complex and factory production lines, it is impossible and takes years to build up. He calls it “pie in the sky” and says the authors of Project 2025 appear to be oblivious to practical considerations. He envisions upheaval and confusion if a “nuclear gung-ho mentality” were to prevail.

With hot wars in Ukraine and Gaza dragging on, and heightened tensions between the U.S. and Russia, China, North Korea and (nonnuclear) Iran, there are Democrats and Republicans in Congress who support spending hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize and life extend U.S. nuclear weapons. There is also a risk that the U.S. government could choose to reconfigure or redistribute existing nuclear weapons or those held in long-term storage onto nuclear-capable bombers or submarines. Doing so would almost certainly drive Russia to do the same, says Kristensen. “They also have thousands of warheads in storage. They will start putting them on their missiles as well. Then we will have more nuclear warheads pointing at us and then what have we accomplished? It’s really a fool’s errand.”