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Nuclear Threats Are Looming, And Nobody Knows How Many Nukes Are Out There

Researchers are using open-source intelligence such as satellite imagery and military parades to lift the fog surrounding the world’s nuclear stockpiles.

VICE, By Matthew Gault, 19 December 2023,

As best anyone can tell, there are 12,512 nuclear weapons in the world. But the world of nuclear deterrence is one of secrets and threats. 

Deterrence, the idea that no one will attack you if you have a nuclear weapon, relies on the threat being ambiguous. But scientists and other experts dedicated to reducing that ambiguity work to count the warheads using open-source sources of information such as satellite imagery so the rest of the world can get a better, if imperfect, idea of how many world-ending weapons are out there.

The number of known nukes has grown in recent years, but it’s still down from its alarming 1985 peak of more than 60,000. Keeping track of all the nuclear weapons is hard, and imprecise, work. The nine countries that have them aren’t forthcoming with the exact number of weapons in their stockpile. The U.S. and Russia once shared information about their arsenals with each other as part of anti-proliferation treaties, but negligence on the part of both governments has seen those treaties weaken in the past few years.

So how do we get the number 12,512? The answer is complicated, but it involves high resolution satellite imagery, government reports, and military parades.

Mat Korda, a Senior Research Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), is part of a team of researchers that tracks the world’s nuclear weapons. Every year, they publish their informed estimates as the Nuclear Notebook at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

For Korda, it’s not just about the numbers, which investigators have accepted will not be completely accurate. “The story is not whether or not the number has gone up or down,” he told Motherboard. “The story is about the broader trends we’re seeing in each country’s arsenal. What we’re seeing is that transparency is going down, military stockpiles are going up. The weapons themselves are getting more sophisticated. Some of these legacy weapons from the Cold War era are getting decommissioned and we’re getting new types of weapons. All of this comes together to make nuclear use more likely than at any time since the end of the Cold War.”

The nuclear powers don’t make the task of estimating their stockpiles easy. Some countries share information that hints at their nuclear capacity, but don’t explicitly state how many weapons they have. The U.K. has discussed setting limits to the amount of nukes it has, but hasn’t disclosed how many it has. “On the other end of the spectrum, you have countries that have never acknowledged that they have nuclear weapons. Like Israel,” Korda said. “Within that broad spectrum, there is not much official data about nuclear weapons stockpiles that the public has access to. And so we are forced to rely on little snippets of information that we can divine from things like treaty data, or government statements or leaks or freedom of information requests or military parade videos.”

Korda said there are three main sources the researchers use to figure out how many nukes everyone has: government sources, media sources, and open-source intelligence. Government sources are often the most helpful and clear, as long as you’re looking in the right place. “Treaties, official statements, or freedom of information requests that we can make to a particular agency,” he said. “These are things like budgetary documents where there’s a lot of stakeholders involved. And so we can rely on that kind of data.”

But government and media sources have biases that Korda and his team have to keep in mind when they’re working. “When the United States makes estimates about how many warheads China is going to build in the future, these are estimates based on assumptions. And those assumptions are based on biases or might be meant to send some kind of political message,” he said……………………………………………………………………………. more https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bj7x/nuclear-threats-are-looming-and-nobody-knows-how-many-nukes-are-out-there

January 20, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war