The Warhead Ledger
1 SQUARE = 25 WARHEADS · ROUNDEDEvery square below is roughly 25 warheads. Read each row left to right: orange squares are deployed and ready for delivery, ochre are stockpiled in reserve, gray are retired and queued for dismantlement. Row length shows total arsenal size at a glance.
Russia and the United States together hold roughly 86% of all nuclear weapons. No other state fields more than a few hundred.
Eight Decades of Stockpiles
GLOBAL TOTAL, 1945–2026From 2 warheads in 1945 to a Cold War peak of ~70,300 in 1986, then three decades of decline. The reductions have nearly stalled: cuts now come almost entirely from the US and Russia dismantling already-retired weapons, while China, India, Pakistan and North Korea grow their stockpiles. In February 2026 the New START treaty expired — for the first time in over 50 years there is no treaty limiting US and Russian strategic arsenals.
Country Dossiers
TAP TO EXPAND · HISTORY, FORCES & SPECIFICATIONSEach dossier opens to a stacked bar of that country's deployed / reserve / retired split, a short history of its program, its current doctrine, its key delivery systems, and an at-a-glance specification table. Russia and the United States are expanded by default.
Delivery Systems Atlas
MAJOR STRATEGIC SYSTEMS · BAR = MAX RANGE · HATCHED = IN DEVELOPMENTBars compare maximum range against an 18,000 km scale — gridlines every 3,600 km. The yield column shows the estimated explosive power of a single warhead and of a fully loaded missile (MIRVed missiles carry several). Hatched bars are systems still in development.
Modernization Watch
ACTIVE PROGRAMS · STATUS AS OF JUNE 2026For the first time since the Cold War, every nuclear-armed state is modernizing or expanding its forces simultaneously. The US is replacing all three legs of its triad at once — a ~$1.5 trillion, 30-year effort — while Russia finishes a multi-decade replacement of Soviet-era systems and China builds the fastest-growing arsenal on Earth.
If Deterrence Fails: Modeled Consequences
PUBLISHED ACADEMIC MODELING · NOT PREDICTIONWhat would nuclear war actually do? The scenarios below are drawn from peer-reviewed consequence studies and government effects research — the same modeling used in arms-control policy. They begin where every nuclear war would begin: with a decision made in minutes.
Step zero — the decision window
Total flight time of a land-based missile between Russia and the United States. Everything below has to happen inside it.
A missile fired from a submarine near the coast cuts warning time in half — one reason submarines are considered the most destabilizing first-strike platform.
Indian and Pakistani capitals are minutes apart by missile. There is effectively no launch-on-warning window at all — decisions are pre-delegated or made instantly.
The ladder below follows publicly documented US procedure for an inbound ICBM attack. Roughly 2,100 US, Russian, British and French warheads sit on alert postures built around timelines like this one.
Launch. Early-warning satellites detect booster plumes within about one minute of ignition.
Missile event conference. Warning centers (NORAD / STRATCOM) convene; duty officers begin characterizing the launch — how many, from where, headed where.
Radar confirmation. Ground-based radars acquire the missiles over the horizon, confirming trajectories. Assessment: this is real, and it is aimed at us.
The President is briefed. A threat conference connects national leadership. The military aide opens the "football"; pre-built strike options are presented. The briefing itself may last under a minute.
The decision. If silo-based missiles are to be launched before incoming warheads destroy them — "launch on warning" — the order must be given here. The window for the most consequential decision in human history can be as little as six minutes, made on sensor data alone, with no possibility of recall once missiles fly.
Order transmitted. The launch order is authenticated and broadcast. ICBM crews can fire within one to two minutes of receipt; submarines take around fifteen.
Retaliation away. If launched on warning, both arsenals are now crossing in flight.
Detonation. The first incoming warheads arrive. Everything in the scenarios below now begins.
Scenario A — Limited Regional Exchange · India & Pakistan
BASIS: TOON, ROBOCK ET AL. 2019 · XIA ET AL. 2022Escalation. The standard modeled pathway: a mass-casualty crisis triggers conventional war; facing defeat on the ground, the losing side employs battlefield nuclear weapons against armored formations. Counter-city retaliation follows within days.
Urban firestorms. Detonations of 15–100 kt over some of the densest cities on Earth. 50–125 million dead from blast, thermal burns and collapse. Burn casualties exceed the world's entire specialized burn-care capacity thousands of times over; most of the injured receive no treatment at all.
Fallout & collapse. Local fallout plumes settle across the Indus and Ganges basins — the agricultural heartland feeding over a billion people. Water, fuel, power and medical systems across both countries cease functioning.
The sky darkens. Firestorm smoke — 16–36 million tons of soot — rises into the stratosphere where rain cannot wash it out. Global temperatures fall 2–5°C; growing seasons shorten worldwide; the Asian monsoon weakens.
Global famine. Crop yields fall 10–40% worldwide. Grain reserves exhaust within a year or two. In the larger modeled cases, 1.5 to over 2 billion people — most of them in countries that fired no weapons — face death by starvation. A "regional" nuclear war is a global event.
Scenario B — Full-Scale Exchange · US, Russia & Allies
BASIS: PRINCETON SGS "PLAN A" 2019 · XIA ET AL. 2022 · OTA 1979First use. In Princeton's simulation, a conventional NATO–Russia war escalates with a single tactical "warning shot." Doctrine and posture drive what follows: each rung of escalation invites the next.
Counterforce. Hundreds of warheads strike missile fields, submarine pens, bomber bases and command nodes across Europe, Russia and North America. Plan A tallies ~91.5 million casualties — 34 million dead, 57 million injured — in the first few hours alone. Many counterforce targets are ground-burst, maximizing fallout.
Countervalue. Remaining forces strike cities and industry. High-altitude detonations generate electromagnetic pulses; continental power grids, communications and logistics fail more or less simultaneously. China's growing arsenal makes any great-power exchange potentially three-sided — the modeling here remains US–Russia centered.
~360 million direct deaths. Firestorms consume hundreds of cities. Fallout from thousands of ground bursts contaminates downwind regions for hundreds of kilometers; lethal doses outdoors persist for days to weeks in the worst plumes. Organized medicine effectively no longer exists in the warring states.
Nuclear winter. ~150 million tons of soot blots out sunlight. Global average temperature falls ~8°C — below Ice Age levels — for years. Mid-latitude ozone losses of 30–75% drive extreme surface UV. Growing seasons in the northern hemisphere effectively disappear; oceans cool and fisheries collapse.
Two-thirds of humanity. In the Xia et al. model, global calorie production falls ~90% in the worst year. More than 5 billion people die — overwhelmingly from starvation, overwhelmingly outside the warring states. Australia and Argentina, insulated by geography and grain exports, are among the few modeled survivable regions.
The long tail. Soot settles and sunlight returns over ~a decade. Cesium-137 and strontium-90 (30-year half-lives) keep regions around strike zones and fallout corridors restricted for decades. Cancer burdens persist for generations. No published model attempts to estimate when — or whether — industrial civilization reorganizes.
The scale problem — plotted logarithmically
The Other Use Case: High-Altitude EMP
ALTERNATIVE EMPLOYMENT · NO BLAST ON THE GROUNDAn electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a burst of electromagnetic energy. A nuclear weapon detonated high above the atmosphere produces almost no blast, heat or fallout at the surface — instead, nearly all of its energy converts into an intense electromagnetic field that blankets everything within line of sight of the burst.
The mechanism: gamma rays from the detonation strike air molecules in the upper atmosphere and knock electrons loose (the Compton effect). Earth's magnetic field whips those electrons into a sweeping current that radiates a pulse downward across a continental footprint. A single warhead detonated at ~400 km over the central United States could, in principle, cast a damaging field over most of the lower 48 states.
This is what made EMP attractive to Cold War planners as a counter-infrastructure weapon — and why it appears in the Scenario B timeline above. It targets the electronic nervous system of a society rather than its people directly. The danger is indirect: a long-duration collapse of the power grid, communications, water, fuel and finance.
The three phases of a HEMP pulse
A high-altitude EMP (HEMP) is not a single jolt but three overlapping waves, defined by international standards (IEC 61000-2-9) as E1, E2 and E3. Each attacks different equipment over a different timescale — which is what makes the combined pulse so difficult to shield against.
The shock
A near-instantaneous, extremely intense field — rising in a few billionths of a second, far faster than lightning. It induces high voltages in any conductor: circuit boards, antennas, control cables, vehicle and aircraft electronics. It outpaces conventional surge protectors, which were never designed for so fast a rise. This is the phase that fries microelectronics outright.
The lightning analog
A broader, somewhat slower pulse similar in character to a nearby lightning strike. On its own it is the most survivable phase — existing lightning protection handles much of it. The hazard is timing: E2 arrives immediately after E1 has already damaged or destroyed the very protective devices that would have absorbed it.
The grid-killer
A slow, powerful distortion of Earth's magnetic field — physically like a severe geomagnetic solar storm. It drives huge quasi-DC currents through long conductors: high-voltage transmission lines and pipelines. These currents saturate and burn out large grid transformers — components that are custom-built, weigh hundreds of tons, and can take a year or more to replace. E3 is why an EMP event could keep the lights off for months.
Why it matters for this page: EMP needs no accuracy, no re-entry vehicle and no large yield — a single high-altitude detonation does the work. That low bar is exactly why it features in proliferation and homeland-security debates. The historical record is thin but real: the 1962 Starfish Prime test, a 1.4-megaton shot 400 km above the Pacific, knocked out streetlights, tripped circuit breakers and damaged telephone equipment in Hawaii roughly 1,400 km away — in an era of rugged 1960s electronics. Modern solid-state systems are far more sensitive, though hardening and grid-protection standards have also advanced.
Why altitude is everything — the line-of-sight footprint
EMP travels in straight lines from the burst point. The higher the detonation, the farther the horizon — and the wider the area the pulse can reach. This single geometric fact is what turns one warhead into a continental-scale weapon.
Footprint radius is set by line of sight to the curved Earth — roughly proportional to the square root of burst height. A detonation around 400 km over the central United States places the entire lower 48 within the affected region. Field strength is strongest near the center of the footprint and tapers toward its edge.
In their own words — the EMP Commission
Congress chartered the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack, which reported in 2004, 2008 and again in 2017–2018. Its conclusions remain the central reference in US policy debate — though some of its more severe casualty projections are contested by other analysts.
The Commission found that society's growing dependence on electronics makes the nation's vulnerability worse with each passing year, while adversaries less reliant on technology are affected far less — an inherently asymmetric threat.
— ASSESSING THE THREAT FROM EMP ATTACK, EXECUTIVE REPORT (2018), PARAPHRASEDIn tests, the Commission exposed the supervisory control (SCADA) systems that run the grid to simulated EMP. Its summary of the result was blunt: "every system tested failed."
— EMP COMMISSION SCADA TESTING, AS CITED IN ENERGY, SUSTAINABILITY & SOCIETY (2019)A single attack, the Commission warned, could shut down a large part of the electric grid within the exposed area almost instantaneously — with the further possibility that the failure cascades into grids beyond the line-of-sight zone as electrical effects propagate outward.
— SENATE HEARING RECORD S. HRG. 115-284 (2017), PARAPHRASEDThe grid's specific weak points
The concern is not abstract. A handful of concrete, well-documented fragilities turn a one-time pulse into a potentially long-duration outage.
The voltage mismatch
An E1 pulse can induce on the order of tens of thousands of volts in exposed conductors. The miniaturized electronics that run modern infrastructure operate on just 3–4 volts — leaving a vast margin for damage.
Transformer replacement
The largest extra-high-voltage transformers are custom-built, often overseas, weigh hundreds of tons, and are not stockpiled in quantity. E3 currents can destroy them faster than they can be replaced.
Few points of failure
The continental US runs on three major interconnections. Damage concentrated at key high-voltage nodes can ripple far beyond the directly affected area, threatening cascading regional collapse.
The proposed standard
The Commission recommended hardening critical infrastructure against E3 "heave" fields of about 85 volts per kilometer — a more realistic protective benchmark than older assumptions. Adoption has been partial.
Interdependence is the multiplier the Commission stressed most: power enables water pumping, fuel refining and pipelines, telecommunications, finance and food distribution. Because each of these also depends on the others, a prolonged grid outage doesn't stay contained — it propagates through every connected system. A 2016 GAO review found federal action on the 2008 recommendations had been uneven, and the grid remains only partially hardened today. Context for this page: EMP is a genuine and documented vulnerability, but the most catastrophic societal-collapse projections are debated, and protective standards, grid hardening and spare-transformer programs have advanced since the first Commission report.
The Arms Control Ledger
● ORANGE = SHAPES TODAY'S ARSENALS · FILLED = DEFUNCTSix decades of treaties cut global stockpiles by more than 80% from their peak. That architecture has now almost entirely collapsed: with New START's expiry in February 2026, US and Russian strategic forces are unconstrained by treaty for the first time in over half a century.
Reading the Numbers
Warheads mated to missiles or kept at bomber bases. Strategic deployed weapons can be delivered intercontinentally; some can launch within minutes.
Warheads in central storage that belong to the military stockpile. They can be returned to launchers — a process called "uploading."
Removed from the stockpile and queued for dismantlement, but still largely intact. Mostly a US and Russian category.
Explosive energy in kilotons or megatons of TNT equivalent. The Hiroshima bomb was ~15 kt; many modern strategic warheads are 100–800 kt.
Land-based ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and bomber aircraft. Only the US, Russia, China and India operate all three legs.
The 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty recognizes five nuclear-weapon states (US, Russia, UK, France, China). India, Pakistan and Israel never joined; North Korea withdrew in 2003.
Go Deeper — Interactive Tools
EXTERNAL · OPEN IN A NEW TABThe numbers on this page describe arsenals in aggregate. These independent tools let you explore the physics and geography for yourself.
The definitive interactive effects simulator. Pick any city, any yield from this page's atlas — a 90 kt W76-1 or a 7.5 Mt full Sarmat load — and see modeled fireball, blast, thermal and fallout rings over a real map, with casualty estimates. The fastest way to make the kiloton figures above concrete.
OPEN NUKEMAP → MISSILEMAPSame author as NUKEMAPPlot missile ranges and accuracy from any launch point — pairs directly with the Delivery Systems Atlas ranges above.
OPEN → PLAN APrinceton Science & Global SecurityThe four-minute simulation video behind Scenario B — watch the US–Russia escalation sequence play out step by step.
WATCH → FAS STATUS PAGEFederation of American ScientistsThe primary source for this page's stockpile figures — check here for the latest annual Nuclear Notebook revisions.
VISIT → OUR WORLD IN DATAHistorical datasetsEight decades of stockpile, testing and treaty data behind this page's timeline — downloadable and chartable.
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