The Nuclear Weapons Age at 80

1945-2025

Gregory Loew, Stanford Emeritus Professor, July 2025 

2025 marks the 80^th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test in the US in New Mexico in July 1945 and the dropping of two US nuclear bombs respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Shortly thereafter, the Cold War started, and the international nuclear arms race took off. In my book on The Human Condition, Reality, Science and History, I have devoted a section on the international balance of terror regime that came along in these eighty years, which I am summarizing and updating here.

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In October 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis came very close to blowing up the world. By 1985, the arms race had increased the world’s arsenals to close to 70,000 nuclear warheads with yields growing from tens of kilotons to tens of megatons. Fortunately, over this period, leaders gradually accepted the “MAD” principle of Mutual Assured Destruction. This means that nuclear weapons serve only as mutual deterrents but cannot help to win a war if both sides possess them. This realization led to various arms control reduction treaties like the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) between the US and Russia. As a result, by the beginning of 2025, there were only about ~12,400 warheads worldwide, as shown below:

Russia: 5580 warheads, with 4380 in the military stockpile, including 1549 strategic warheads deployed on delivery vehicles and up to 2000 tactical weapons, and additional 1200 warheads awaiting dismantlement. 

US: 5225 warheads, with 3748 in the military stockpile, including 1419 strategic warheads deployed on delivery vehicles and about 100 tactical weapons, and additional 1477 warheads awaiting dismantlement.

China: 600 warheads

France: 290 warheads

UK: 225 warheads

India: 172 warheads

Pakistan: 170 warheads

Israel: 90 warheads

North Korea: 50 warheads

Despite these reductions, a fraction of these arsenals if used would still be sufficient to make the earth inhabitable, except perhaps for cockroaches. The current New START Treaty will expire by February 2026. Agreeing to do this with lower caps would be highly desirable but not obvious with the current relations between the US and Russia around the war in Ukraine, the situation between China and Taiwan and the tensions in the Middle East.

Actually, as long as any nation possesses any nuclear weapons, the risk of a deliberate or accidental launch, or a terrorist act is just too high. Nothing short of the elimination of all nuclear warheads can protect humanity. This is the goal of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN supports the UN Treaty to ban nuclear weapons or the Treaty on the Prohibition of nuclear weapons. The treaty is currently supported by 73 states parties  and ICAN is a coalition of over 650 partner organizations including international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They deserve our support...

A small number of nuclear weapons should be turned over to a special branch of the UN in case they are needed to deflect the trajectory of an asteroid threatening the earth.

Let’s face it: can our species HOMO become SAPIENS enough to take this step? Do we really want to relegate our earth to cockroaches?