Global Nuclear Weapons Map

Two numbers, and the difference matters. The military stockpile is the warheads actually assigned to the armed forces. The total inventory adds those retired but still intact and queued for dismantling — real weapons in real bunkers, which is why the widely quoted world figure is the larger one. The timeline plots stockpiles, because that is the measure published for every year back to 1945; country cards show both.

Every nuclear weapon on Earth, mapped. Nine states hold the world's arsenals; a tenth built the bomb and then gave it up; several more tried and stopped. This map shows who has them, how many, where they are physically kept, and what they would do — and lets you scrub the whole nuclear age from 1938 to 2026.

Reading the colours. Country markers are coloured by how certain the world is: green for states that openly declare their arsenals, amber for an arsenal that is universally assessed but never confirmed by its owner (Israel), and red for a state widely judged to be pursuing or capable of pursuing a weapon (Iran). Sites holding another country's weapons — US bombs in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Türkiye; Russian weapons in Belarus — carry the owner's flag, because those warheads are not the host country's.

Please read this. Nothing here is secret. Every location, number and figure is drawn from published, open sources — the Federation of American Scientists, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Nuclear Notebook, SIPRI, the IAEA, the Arms Control Association, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and commercial satellite imagery. Warhead counts are independent analysts' estimates, not official declarations: most nuclear states publish little or nothing. Where sources disagree, the map says so. Site coordinates identify publicly documented facilities, many of them decades old and photographed from orbit every day.

The effects simulator uses the standard unclassified scaling equations from The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Glasstone & Dolan, US Government, public domain) — the same civil-defence maths behind Alex Wellerstein's NUKEMAP. It is a teaching tool, not a targeting tool: real outcomes depend on terrain, weather, building stock and time of day, and casualty figures are rough order-of-magnitude estimates only.

Sources: FAS Nuclear Notebook · Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists · SIPRI Yearbook · Arms Control Association · Nuclear Threat Initiative · IAEA · International Panel on Fissile Materials · CSIS Beyond Parallel · Glasstone & Dolan. Borders: Natural Earth. Globe: globe.gl.

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If you want to go further

This map deliberately carries no political message; the physics is the same whatever you conclude from it. But it would be strange to open this subject and then just close the tab, so: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the FAS Nuclear Information Project, the Arms Control Association, NTI and ICAN all publish continuously, disagree with each other productively, and are where nearly everything on this map came from.

A note on the numbers, in the words of the people who make them: FAS states plainly that “the exact number of nuclear weapons in each country's possession is a closely held national secret, so the estimates presented here come with significant uncertainty.” That uncertainty is carried through this whole map. See ☰ → What we're least sure about for the specific soft spots, in the researchers' own words.

Made for 42-apps. Data errors and corrections are welcome — every figure here is checkable against a published source, and if one of them is wrong it should be fixed.