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The US State Department has revealed the number of nuclear weapons in the country’s arsenal for the first time since 2018, when former US President Donald Trump decided to keep the figures secret.
In a recent statement, the State Department announced the number of US nuclear weapons, both active and inactive, at 3,750 as of September 2020.
“Increasing the transparency of states’ nuclear stockpiles is important to nonproliferation and disarmament efforts,” the State Department claimed.
3/3 The Biden administration deserves a big applause for having restored Obama’s nuclear transparency and reversed the Trump administration’s counterproductive classification of the stockpile number. https://t.co/j2uOE9TBQf @UnderSecT @NNSAHruby
— Hans Kristensen (also on Bluesky) (@nukestrat) October 5, 2021
2/3 – The 3,750 stockpile number is only 50 warheads off the 3,800 warheads we estimated in our latest US Nuclear Notebook. https://t.co/g0NxT7dwZK pic.twitter.com/qtB6WK2OIm
— Hans Kristensen (also on Bluesky) (@nukestrat) October 5, 2021
The United States has produced more than 70,000 nuclear warheads since 1945, more than all other nuclear-weapon states combined. The US government spent at least US$9.61 trillion in present-day terms on nuclear weapons, according to experts.
The US and Russia are the world’s largest holders and developers of nuclear weapons, followed by Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and the Israeli regime, which has not declared its possession of nuclear warheads, but does not deny having them. The regime does not allow any international inspection of its nuclear facilities either.
Meanwhile, Iran’s permanent ambassador to the United Nations Majid Takht Ravanchi said that US and Israel were making it impossible to de-nuclearize the Middle East.
“In our region, the US stance and that of the Israeli regime on the Middle East free zone of nuclear weapons, initiated by Iran in 1974, have prevented the establishment of such a zone,” Majid Takht Ravanchi told a UN General Assembly meeting on October 6th.
Though its weapons program has turned Israel into the region’s sole possessor of nuclear weapons, Tel Aviv neither admits nor denies owning such armaments. It has, meanwhile, invariably evaded scrutiny by the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), thanks to constant protection provided for it by the United States on the international stage.
“The Israeli regime possesses all types of weapons of mass destruction and threatens to use them against the regional countries,” Takht Ravanchi said.
“This regime must be forced to join all related instruments, including the NPT (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), without any precondition while accepting the comprehensive safeguards of the IAEA,” he added.
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