The arsenal.
For eighty years humanity has counted its own nuclear stockpile, and the count tells a story with a shape: a climb to 70,374 warheads in 1986, a long fall to 12,187 today — and, in the newest years of the record, the fall has stopped. This report draws the whole ledger: every state's stockpile since 1945 as the analysts publish it, all 2,056 nuclear tests — 178 of them in 1962 alone — and the roll of the nine, which carries one entry unlike the others: South Africa built the bomb, then walked away, and remains the only state ever to do so. The treaty dates stand on the axis as dates; what they caused, the reader may judge. Every figure is computed from the records at render time.
published 2026-08-29 · data cutoff 2026 (stockpiles) · 2024 (tests) · edition 1 — updated only by a new dated edition · sources: FAS via OWID
The mountain, and where we stand on it.
The world total, with every state's line beneath it. The 1986 peak is the mountain's summit; the long descent spans the treaty era; and the right-hand edge is the part the record is newest about — the descent has flattened, and some lines have turned up. Treaty milestones stand as dated verticals, named and nothing more.
2,056 detonations, and then near-silence.
Every nuclear test on record, year by year, colored by state. 1962 stands tallest in this ledger — 178 detonations in one year, one every other day — and after 1996 the chart falls almost silent, broken only by South Asia's 1998 pair and North Korea's six. Each year's total is computed by this page as the sum of the eight testing states — the source publishes no world row.
The roll — and the one who left.
Nine states hold the bomb today. Two of every three warheads on Earth sit in just two arsenals — 66% of the world line, 83% of what the nine declare between them. And beneath the nine stands a tenth line at zero: South Africa, which built six devices, dismantled every one before 1994, and joined the treaty as a non-weapon state. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan gave up inherited weapons; South Africa remains the only state that built the bomb and then unmade it.
Counting the uncountable, honestly.
Estimates, and labeled so. No state publishes an audited warhead count. The stockpile figures are the Federation of American Scientists' published estimates — the standard scholarly series — drawn exactly as published via Our World in Data. Where a program is undeclared (Israel), the figure is the analysts' estimate of it and the exhibit says so.
What this page computes and what it refuses. The tests-per-year world total is computed here as the sum of the eight testing states, because the source publishes no world row — stated on the exhibit. The treaty verticals are a curated table of eight milestone dates; this page draws them at their positions and claims no causal effect — the reader can see what the lines did next to them. No yield estimates, no casualty modeling, no scenario of any kind appears on this page.
Why it is on this site. The arsenal is the grid's oldest tail risk and its first instrument-watched one — the same satellites and seismometers this site reads elsewhere were built, in part, to watch this ledger.