For the first time in seven years, the Department Defense refused to declassify the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said Wednesday.
The nonprofit group, which counts nuclear warheads, delivery vehicles, and carrier craft worldwide, said it received notice from the Department of Energy that the Pentagon refused an October request to declassify the quantity of nuclear weapons maintained and dismantled for the government’s 2018 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, 2018. Both agencies must approve release of the data, and DOE said it had not objected.
To start the now-ended streak, the Barack Obama administration declassified the size of the U.S. stockpile in 2010. The federal government, at the prompting of at least the Federation of American Scientists, has declassified stockpile numbers in every subsequent year through fiscal 2017, the nonprofit said. The Bill Clinton administration partially declassified the size of the stockpile in 1996.
According to an unidentified official quoted by the the Federation of American Scientists in a Wednesday blog post, the federal government reversed its recent practice because declassifying the figure for almost a decade has not convinced Russia to share the size of its own stockpile.
The Defense Department also wants more “transparency” from China, FAS said it was told.
There were 3,822 nuclear warheads in the U.S. stockpile in fiscal 2017, according to the latest declassified data provided to the Federation of American Scientists.
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which took effect in 2011, caps deployed U.S. and Russian long-range warheads at 1,550. Both nations maintain hefty reserves of undeployed warheads. Russia has an estimated 4,490 warheads, according to FAS’ latest Nuclear Notebook on Russian forces.
