Thursday, January 16, 2014

Status of the Russian Nuclear Arsenal via Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces Blog

After the release of the last START data exchange in 2009 it has become rather difficult to get a good breakdown of the numbers of deployed launchers and warheads - the aggregate New START numbers leave too much room for uncertainty. Still, it's been a while wince the last update, so it is time a new attempt to make sense of the New START numbers.

According to the most recent data exchange, as of 1 September 2013 Russia had 1400 warheads associated with 473 deployed launchers. It is 19 launchers and 80 warheads less than in March 2013 - quite a significant drop. It's hard to get the structure of the strategic forces working back from these two numbers, so I'll try to start with what we know about deployed systems and then see if the numbers match (although I know that they don't).

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