This is a NASA Blue Marble image of the estimated North Korean Nuclear Test site, 2006.
Image: NASA
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The death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has riveted international attention on the threat of nuclear weapons. Kim was widely reported to have been pursuing nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles to deliver them, and he presided over a pair of nuclear bomb blast tests (confirmed by seismograph). No one outside North Korea knows whether the secretive, totalitarian nation possesses an actual warhead. And no one is quite sure where Kim's youngest son and presumed successor Kim Jong-un stands on the goal of assembling a competitive nuclear arsenal.
It could only take one nuclear device and one maniacal leader to wreak global havoc, but the U.S. and seven other nations worldwide have many nuclear warheads in their arsenals. The latest tally (pdf), made at the end of 2009 by Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., is below. Stockpiles in Russia and the U.S. dwarf those of other countries.
- Russia—13,000 nuclear warheads
- U.S.—9,400
- France—300
- China—240
- U.K.—180
- Israel—80 to 100
- Pakistan—70 to 90
- India—60 to 80
- North Korea—unknown
Norris and Kristensen estimate that 4,850 of Russia's warheads are operational; the rest are retired or waiting to be dismantled under arms reduction treaties. About 5,200 of the U.S. warheads are considered operational. In their report, Norris and Kristensen noted that "we are not aware of credible information on how North Korea has weaponized its nuclear weapons capability." They add that U.S. Air Force intelligence did not indicate that any of the country's ballistic missiles were capable of carrying a nuclear warhead at that time.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'd be very surprised if there are only 9 nations with nuclear weapons.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProbably only 9 that have tested nuclear weapons but it seems inconcievable that other nations would not have secretly developed them.
Nuclear arms are quite likely like cockroaches. For every one you see- there are a dozen hidden in the side-boards.
"Probably only 9 that have tested nuclear weapons but it seems inconcievable that other nations would not have secretly developed them."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot to mention the ones that are the actual possessors of some of those warheads the Russians THINK are still in their arsenal. After the USSR broke up, they became a little shoddy about keeping track of the inventory.
We need to keep in mind that the United States and Russia have both A-bombs and H-bombs, and there is a great deal of difference between their yields.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think only the first five countries listed have hydrogen (fusion) bombs. I assume the warheads listed for the first five countries are H-bombs while those for the other four are smaller impact uranium (fission) bonds, or A-bombs. Is that correct?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNonsense. 32 nations have nuclear power plants, most don't want nuclear bombs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClearly most European nations, many in east/southeast Asia, and probably a few others like Brazil are CAPABLE of designing weapons. They may well have plans on file. That's a pretty decent ways from having a weapon.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou've got to produce weapons-grade fissile material, which is non-trivial. It isn't that HARD really, it is just very expensive and requires specific facilities that are hard to hide. Of course Japan or Germany could have easily pilfered small amounts of plutonium from their own nuclear fuel cycles over decades and made a bomb. The problem is they most definitely haven't TESTED a bomb. An untested bomb is somewhat of a threat perhaps, but you really don't want to be lobbing duds around when you mean business.
In other words it would take a few years for the most likely candidates to carry out a full test program, at which point we'd be 100% sure they're armed.
'lost' or stolen weapons are kind of another story. You can really come up with most any hypothesis about how well the Russians have tracked all their weapons grade material. Still, without a delivery system you're kind of not really in the club.
One of my previous bosses is on the team that has helped the Russians dismantle bombs. I used to work for the Army lab that tested bombs. Another of my old supervisors was at Starfish Prime. With our help, the Russian plutonium is here in the US to be mixed into uranium to make MOX [Mixed Oxide] fuel for reactors. Quit making up nonsense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPower plants make Plutonium240. Plutonium240 [from power plants] makes bombs that the Department of Defense [DOD] doesn't want. They fizzle, yielding only 200 tons equivalent. Not worth bothering with. Bad for logistics. DOD wants only light efficient Pu239 bombs that make big booms. DOD makes its own Pu239. Pu239 is hard to make and requires a specialized [short cycle] reactor. Since ANY plutonium bomb [implosion device] requires technology that is beyond most countries, the technology is also beyond all non-countries. A 200 ton equivalent explosion would be easier to make with a chemical explosive like RDX.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNorth Korea may have made a Pu240 bomb. If so, we are not impressed. Nobody else ever did anything that stupid with Pu240. Making a Pu240 bomb would be crazy as well as very difficult.
32 countries have nuclear power plants. Nobody but North Korea ever used power plant plutonium for a bomb, if North Korea did.
U235 bombs are far easier to make than Pu bombs. Notice that Iran seems to be working on a U235 bomb, not a plutonium bomb. Iran doesn't have the technology for a plutonium bomb. U235 can be used in a simple gun-type device.
Stolen nuclear devices have a relatively short life. The fissionable material is degrading all the time and after several years they will no longer be sufficient to be fissile. Likely the most usable of such nefarious weapons would be tactical weapons as they are the least sophisticated in terms of how they would be set off. Such a weapon would be an artillery shell or torpedo device which were all the rage in the old days of duck and cover. I understand that at one time Castro actually had his odd finger on the trigger for such weapons in cahoots wtih the USSR who controlled the rocket launch weapons during the era when the world teetered on oblivion. I suspect that modern weapons are a lot more difficult to make functional if they were to be stolen but the fissile materials could be re purified and then...we have big problems to be sure. I hate to think but one day we will awake to read in the morning edition on line that this or that place was vapourised by this or that lunatic fringe group. The genie is out of the bottle and this is a bigger problem than Global Warming or nation to nation confrontation. Terrorism with nukes is the scenario that all governments are considering as a serious scenario.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGlobal Nuclear war Jan 2013
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRemember the old joke: What do you call a country with a few nuclear warheads? Answer: A target.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy would a rational country want to become a target? Most of the countries with nuclear capability recognize that to even hint at usage is to court annihilation.
The real risks, as noted above, are bombs that "disappear" from inventory, and bombs from crazy countries. Let's hope we were smart enough to do everything possible to help Russia secure their inventory and let's hope our intelligence agencies have better understanding of the crazies capabilities than they have let on.
I'd second that. India and Pakistan rank up there, and I have a gut feeling there are probably two more we haven't noticed yet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisT
Its unclear to me which part of a nuclear device has a short half life. For a fusion device, the tritium certainly has a relatively short half life (about 12 years), but U235 has half life on the order of 400kyr, and Pu239 is like 22kyr and pu240 is 6500 yr.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suppose the explosive components would decay, but which part are you thinking about specifically.
"Quit making up nonsense."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not "making up" ANYTHING. It's been repoted by reliable news outlets that Russia has several kiloton-sized "suitcase nukes" unaccounted for:
"Gen. Alexander Lebed, the Russian national security chief under President Boris Yeltsin, completed an inventory that 'came up short by something between 50 and 100 suitcases'".
(From http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/08/rec.nuclear.attack/index.html)
"Plutonium240 [from power plants] makes bombs that the Department of Defense [DOD] doesn't want."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPu-240 may not be suitable for government-grade strategic or tactical nukes, but I'm sure that there are terrorist groups out there that would be more than happy to get their hands on it to make a "dirty bomb". And unnscrupulous governments/countries that would be willing to sell it to them.
Make that "unscrupulous governments/companies".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Agentes de la CIA, y de la KGB, espían a mis hijos, siguen a mi mujer, y solo por robar, 25 portaaviones, una bomba de neutrones y un reactor nuclear...". Google can translate this, it's music, here are just the lyrics. The title is "Solo por robar". Salut +
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisgoogle says...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgents of the CIA, and KGB, Spain to my children, my wife still, and only for stealing, 25 aircraft carriers, a neutron bomb and a nuclear reactor ..
...what?
Correction: North Korea - 0
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo neutrinos, no gamma rays, no radioactive surface pollution means some crank midget on high heels and with top hair stored 5,000 ton of TNT in a cave and set it off.
"came up short by something between 50 and 100 suitcases"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is correct, but later they found out that the Microsoft database lost indexes. The missing bombs were still in the data but couldn't be found using the index.
If you are scared of this type of thing, then you should take control of your own life. My ranch can sustain my family with meat, fruit, grains and veggies. I have a safe under my house full of cash and gold. I have many guns and thousands of rounds of ammo. I'm located on the West Slope of the Rockies and there is not a viable target within hundreds of miles.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not scared of anything. I don't care who has whatever kind of bomb.
There are a few intelligent people and lots of idiots commenting on these articles.
Time for Leno. I'll have another cocktail.
If that were actually the case, Lebed's inventory of the arsenal would have turned up "EXTRA" bombs (physically there, but not on the manifest), not "MISSING" ones (on the manifest but not physically there).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I'm located on the West Slope of the Rockies and there is not a viable target within hundreds of miles."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA nuclear bomb blast (particlularly if it's 10 kilotons or larger) that throw radioactive material up into the upper atmosphere, where high-altitude winds can carry it for thousands of miles before it comes back down?
"There are a few intelligent people and lots of idiots commenting on these articles."
And a paranoiac or two, as well.