Since Russia first invaded Ukraine nearly three weeks ago, the threat of nuclear weapon use has risen.
This was made clear on Feb. 27, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his country’s nuclear forces had been placed on “high alert,” the Associated Press reported. The current situation, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is a “nightmare scenario” brought to life.
So, when Putin said his country’s nuclear weapons were on high alert, what did he mean? Also, how many nuclear weapons exist, who has them, and how powerful are they?
Nuclear weapons analysts estimate that the world’s nine nuclear states—China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States—have around 13,000 nuclear warheads in total, according to the Arms Control Association. However, this estimate is based only on publicly available information; there could be many more that states have not disclosed.
“We know which countries have nuclear weapons, but we don’t necessarily know how many nuclear weapons they have; Israel, for instance, does not publicly acknowledge its program,” Anne Harrington, a senior lecturer in international relations at Cardiff University in the U.K., told Live Science. “The number of nuclear weapons China has is also a major subject of debate.”
In the United States, nuclear weapons are “kept under cryptographic combination lock to prevent unauthorized use,” Hickey said. In theory, only the president has the authority to sanction their use, but according to Hickey, “if the cryptographic code is input or bypassed, the nuclear weapons could be armed in a matter of minutes.” However, Hickey also confirmed that these weapons would need to be “affixed to a missile or deployed on an aircraft” in order to be launched.
Given that the launch of a nuclear weapon would, in all likelihood, be met with immediate retaliation and could lead to all-out global nuclear war, is there a chance that all nuclear weapons could be decommissioned for the greater good? Could there ever be a future without nuclear weapons?
“I don’t think this is going to happen,” said Holger Nehring, chair in contemporary European history at the University of Stirling in Scotland. “Nuclear weapons are mainly a form of deterrence against nuclear attack, so states have no real interest in getting rid of them. Entirely getting rid of nuclear weapons would mean a very high level of trust between all states in the international system, and this is unlikely to be achieved.”
Andrew Futter, a professor of international politics at the University of Leicester in England, agreed. “We have probably reached a point now where further big reductions are unlikely,” he told Live Science.
While each country has its own specific storage system, storage facilities are generally blast-resistant and are often buried underground to “limit the damage of an accidental detonation and to protect from an attack,” Hickey said.
“There is no way to use one [nuclear weapon] without escalating a crisis and murdering civilians,” Hickey told Live Science. “Just this past January, the leaders of China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States together affirmed that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,’ as the consequences of a single weapon detonation would be catastrophic.”
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