U.S. and Russian arms reductions under the New START treaty led an overall trickling down of deployed nuclear forces in 2017, and North Korea might have anywhere from 10 to 20 nuclear weapons, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s latest annual yearbook on nuclear weapons and arms control.
Including deployed and nondeployed forces, the institute counted a total of 14,465 nuclear weapons belonging to eight nuclear-armed states: the United States; Russia; the United Kingdom; France; China; India; Pakistan; and Israel.
That is down about 3 percent from 2016 levels, according to a Monday press release from the Swedish group.
At a combined 92 percent of the global total, the U.S. and Russian arsenals account for nearly all of these weapons, the institute said. That includes 1,750 deployed U.S. warheads and 1,600 deployed Russian warheads, according to the institute. The global total does not include North Korea’s arsenal.