1945–2024 · FAS / BAS via Our World in Data
The military stockpile of nuclear warheads: deployed, stored, and awaiting dismantlement. A warhead is not a delivery vehicle — capability is the pairing of the two.
Federation of American Scientists and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, via Our World in Data, 1945-2024. Estimates: no state publishes its exact stockpile, and Israel does not even acknowledge that it has one.
The curve is the best visual summary of the Cold War: a peak above 60,000 warheads in the mid-1980s, then a two-thirds fall in twenty years. Quantitative disarmament came with qualitative modernisation.
Nine states hold them, five of them recognised by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. South Africa is the only country to have built an arsenal and then voluntarily dismantled it, in 1991; Ukraine handed its own back to Russia in 1994 in exchange for the Budapest Memorandum guarantees.