Vladimir Putin said that “Russia’s nuclear deterrence force is 90 percent equipped with advanced weapons.” And on Saturday he announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. But how many nuclear weapons does Russia have? And what are those tactics?
According to recent estimates by the Federation of American Scientists, Moscow has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, with 5,977 warheads. While the United States would have 5,428. As a result, the US and Russia would hold about 90% of the world‘s total of these devastating ordnance.
But of the nearly 6,000 Russian nuclear warheads, 1,500 are withdrawn and ready to be dismantled (there would be 1,720 American ones withdrawn from arsenals). And of the remaining 4,500 – the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported a year ago – approximately 1,500 would be those actually deployed on long-range strategic systems, while the remaining 3,000 would be “reserve”.
Russia would have 812 deployed on surface-to-air ballistic missiles, 576 on submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and 200 at heavy bomber bases. The New Start treaty between Russia and the USA – the suspension of which Moscow recently announced – limits strategic nuclear weapons by setting a ceiling of 1,550 warheads and 700 missiles and bombers that can be deployed by each of the two states.
The difference between strategic and tactical
Nuclear weapons are often divided into “strategic” – capable of hitting targets at long ranges – and “tactical”, and on the latter the estimates of the various agencies on Moscow’s arsenal vary greatly: from 1,000 to 2,000 warheads, underlines the Washington Post, according to which these weapons can be launched from land, air and sea, but are not preemptively deployable.