There are an estimated 12,700 nuclear warheads on Earth. Russia has a big chunk of the pie.
Russia has the largest arsenal, which FAS estimates at 5,977 warheads, with the United States having the second-largest arsenal, at 5,428. China has the third largest at an estimated 350 warheads. The US’s fellow NATO defensive alliance members France and the United Kingdom each have 290 and 225 warheads, respectively.
Many of those warheads are held in reserve, for maintenance or potential future dismantlement. Russia and the US both have a smaller portion of their overall nuclear arsenal deployed at places like air force bases, at roughly 1,600 and 1,650 warheads, respectively. That is the baseline level of nuclear readiness between the two countries.Each country with nuclear weapons has its own command and control process that leaders use to decide if, when, and where to launch nuclear weapons.
Sometimes, decisions are made in the detection stage of the process. In 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov saw an early warning of a launch detected by a satellite, but reasoned that the number of launches detected was too few to actually indicate a surprise attack, and chose not to escalate the warning.
It has been over 30 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but Russia inherited the nuclear enterprise of the USSR, and it is possible the country has not updated its posture since. One possible meaning of a shift to high readiness is theNuclear weapons are a devastating technology.
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