The paper, “Beyond the United Kingdom: Trends in Other Nuclear States”, is chock full of radioactive numbers, Mother Jones reports.
“It is estimated that more than 128,000 nuclear warheads have been built since 1945, all but two per cent of them by the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia.”
That leaves a lot of nukes unaccounted for. The UK and France are open about their nuclear program, but China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea don’t give up any information whatsoever. Of course, that’s all since 1945 — things have changed since then. We’ve blown up a bunch of them, many have been retired:
In summer 2010, the world’s nine nuclear states possessed an estimated 22,400 intact warheads. Ninety-five per cent belonged to the US and Russia.
Again, the Big Nuclear Two have most of the plutonium toys. 22,400 is a huge drop from 128,000 career nukes — way to go, humans! — but these numbers are all misleading. 22,400 nuclear weapons is pretty much an absurd concept. It would only take a small fraction of that to end all of human civilisation. But hey, at least we’ve got backups, right? [Mother Jones]
GF
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:21 AMSo humans built thousands of them when only a …few… could blow us all up. Righto.
narthollis
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 10:09 AMWhat is even more disturbing is when you consider that modern nuclear weapons have a much higher yield than the older ones.
The US are happy to ‘disarm’ because it means they can look good for getting rid of the old bulky useless warheads they would have been getting rid of anyway.
yawn
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 12:43 PMModern weapons have smaller yields than the warheads deployed in the 60′s. They were simply too powerful to be useful as stategic weapons.
Modern warheads average around 330kt, which although still utterly obscene, is better than the 30Mt+ monsters of yesteryear.
Ultimately, any nuclear weapon is too powerful. Hiroshima was annihilated with ‘only’ 15Kt.
jeremy
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 11:10 AM“China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea don’t give up any information whatsoever”. Yup, so the 2% is basically a guess. China is the biggest unknown, because it has plenty of source material and the will and the tech – the others are limited by the limited number of nuke plants they have – india almost certainly has less than 40 war heads, pakistan less than 10 (They probably had none at all after a tit-for-tat testing round with india no so long ago), North korea appears to have no “weponisable” ones – perhaps a couple that could be put in a truck and driven over the border. Israel had about 100, 20 odd years ago, god only know now. Bottom line – more than enough to 4k us all up.