How to Count Nuclear Weapons
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2024
⏱️ 60 minutes
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Summary
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No one is really sure how many nuclear weapons are out there. Every number you see is a best guess. Russia and the U.S. have the most, sitting at around 5,000 each. France has just under 200, China has about 500 (and is probably building more), and North Korea has around 50. The world’s nuclear powers love to keep the details of these weapons secret, but not too secret. It’s a complex game of signaling and secrets, one that can be difficult to parse from the outside.
Matt Korda of the Federation of American Scientists is here today to walk us through the world’s nuclear powers and the wannabes. Over at the FAS, Korda spends his days looking at high resolution satellite photos of Chinese deserts, pouring over footage of Russian military drills, and reading every line of Pentagon budgets. All that information is mixed together to produce the Nuclear Notebook: a constantly updated inventory of world ending weapons.
Nuclear Threats Are Looming, And Nobody Knows How Many Nukes Are Out There
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature |
| 0:05.1 | It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello listeners, welcome back to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. |
| 0:21.0 | How about that is just like a quick intro, |
| 0:23.7 | Jason. |
| 0:24.4 | Oh, I love that. |
| 0:25.4 | Okay. |
| 0:26.4 | We're here with Matt Korda. |
| 0:28.9 | Sir, could you introduce yourself |
| 0:30.4 | and tell us a little bit about who you work for? |
| 0:32.4 | What do you think you're doing on this |
| 0:33.7 | podcast? |
| 0:34.7 | Great to be here. Thanks for having me on. So I'm Matt. I'm a senior research fellow |
| 0:41.9 | for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American |
| 0:45.6 | Scientists. |
| 0:46.6 | So we track global nuclear arsenals using open sources. |
| 0:51.0 | So we use satellite imagery, budget data, treaty information, we watch |
| 0:56.8 | missile parades, we do all sorts of weird stuff like that, and we try and put together the giant puzzle that is what is going on with |
| 1:06.4 | global nuclear arsenals. The end product here is called the nuclear notebook, right? |
| 1:11.4 | Yeah, and that gets published in the Bulletin of Atomic |
| 1:15.8 | Scientists every every couple months. So we just put out our most recent notebook |
| 1:22.2 | on China, if I'm remembering correctly, every |
| 1:26.0 | how the months are blurring together and the next one is going to be on North Korea. |
... |
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