Built to Never Be Used

It's Thursday, May fourteenth. Yesterday, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had test-launched what he called the most powerful missile in the world. It happened three months after the last nuclear arms treaty between the United States and Russia, New START, expired on February fifth with no replacement. For the first time since the 1970s, there is no agreement between the two largest nuclear powers limiting how many weapons they can build or where they can put them. We're covering this today because most people know nuclear weapons are dangerous in a general, abstract way but have never thought about the specific questions that actually matter. How many exist? Why is it so hard for other countries to build them? Why does every country that has them refuse to give them up? And why did the system of agreements that kept the number declining for forty years just fall apart? There are roughly twelve thousand nuclear weapons on Earth right now. The United States has about 5,200. Russia has about 5,500. Together, those two countries hold nearly ninety percent of the global total. The remaining weapons are spread across seven other countries: the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel (which has never officially confirmed its arsenal but is universally acknowledged to have one), and North Korea. At the peak of the Cold War in 1986, there were over seventy thousand nuclear weapons in the world. The reduction from seventy thousand to twelve thousand happened because of a series of arms control treaties negotiated over four decades. SALT I in 1972 froze the number of missile launchers. The INF Treaty in 1987 eliminated an entire category of missiles from Europe. START I in 1991 cut deployed strategic warheads from roughly twelve thousand to six thousand on each side. New START, the most recent, capped deployed strategic warheads at 1,550 each. Those treaties are now gone. The US withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019, citing Russian violations. New START expired in February 2026 after Russia suspended participation and refused inspections. There is no replacement on the horizon. For the first time in over fifty years, there are no legal limits on how many nuclear weapons the US and Russia can deploy, and no inspections verifying what the other side is doing. Of those twelve thousand weapons, roughly two thousand are on high-alert status, meaning they can be launched within minutes. A submarine-launched ballistic missile can reach its target in about fifteen minutes. The time between detecting an incoming missile and deciding whether to retaliate is shorter than most meetings you've attended this week. The central paradox of nuclear weapons is that they exist to never be used. The entire strategic framework of the nuclear age is built on a concept called mutually assured destruction, or MAD. The logic goes like this: if both sides have enough weapons to completely destroy the other, even after absorbing a first strike, then neither side will ever launch first, because doing so guarantees their own annihilation. You don't win a nuclear war. You just make sure the other side also loses. MAD sounds insane. It has also worked for eighty years. No nuclear weapon has been used in conflict since Nagasaki in 1945. The system has survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, multiple false alarms, and at least one case where a single person's judgment prevented a nuclear exchange. In September 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov was on duty when his early warning system detected five incoming American ICBMs. Protocol required him to report the alerts immediately, which would have triggered a retaliatory launch. Petrov decided, based on gut instinct and the fact that five missiles seemed too few for a real first strike, that the system was malfunctioning. He reported a false alarm. He was right. The readings were caused by sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds. One man's decision not to follow protocol may have prevented the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. So if using nuclear weapons guarantees your own destruction, why does every country that has them refuse to give them up? The answer is that nuclear weapons are the only absolute guarantee against being invaded or overthrown by a larger power. No country with nuclear weapons has ever been conquered. The examples that prove this are the countries that gave theirs up. Ukraine inherited roughly 1,900 nuclear warheads when the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1994, it agreed to return them to Russia in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the US, and the UK. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and launched a full-scale war in 2022. Libya voluntarily dismantled its nuclear program in 2003 after negotiations with the US and UK. Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and killed eight years later. North Korea watched both of those outcomes and drew the obvious conclusion: the weapons stay. Every country considering a nuclear program has studied Ukraine and Libya, and the lesson is the same every time. This brings us to Iran, which connects directly to the war we've been covering for weeks. Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon. But it has been enriching uranium for years and has accumulated enough material enriched to sixty percent to build multiple warheads if it chose to take the final step. The gap between sixty percent enrichment and the ninety percent needed for a weapon is, technically, a matter of weeks. The reason the US and Israel are so focused on preventing an Iranian bomb isn't just the weapon itself. It's the cascade. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia has said publicly that it will pursue its own. Turkey would likely follow. Egypt might as well. The Middle East, already the most volatile region on the planet, would become a multi-nuclear-power zone with several countries that don't have the command-and-control infrastructure, the early warning systems, or the decades of deterrence experience that kept the US and Soviet Union from stumbling into war. The risk isn't that Iran would immediately launch a weapon. The risk is that a nuclear Middle East would have shorter fuses, less communication, and more opportunities for miscalculation. Building a nuclear weapon is hard, but not for the reasons most people assume. The physics has been publicly available since the 1940s. The hard part is getting the fuel. You need either highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and producing either requires industrial-scale centrifuge facilities or nuclear reactors. That infrastructure is massive, expensive, impossible to hide from satellites, and subject to international inspections by the IAEA. Iran's nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordow have been monitored, sanctioned, bombed by Israel, and sabotaged by the US and Israel through Stuxnet, a cyberweapon that caused Iranian centrifuges to tear themselves apart while displaying normal readings to their operators. It's one of the most sophisticated covert operations in history, and it set Iran's program back by years. The contrarian question worth asking: does preventing proliferation actually make the world safer, or does it just preserve the monopoly of the countries that already have weapons? The nine nuclear-armed states collectively tell everyone else that these weapons are too dangerous to possess while spending trillions to maintain and modernize their own arsenals. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 was supposed to be a bargain: the nuclear states would work toward disarmament, and the non-nuclear states would agree not to build weapons. The non-nuclear states mostly kept their end. The nuclear states haven't. The arsenals are smaller than the Cold War peak, but all nine nuclear powers are actively modernizing. The US alone plans to spend over 1.7 trillion dollars on nuclear modernization over the next three decades. Disarmament isn't happening. The question is whether the world is safer with nine nuclear states or with zero, and whether there's any plausible path to either. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. There are roughly twelve thousand nuclear weapons on Earth, ninety percent held by the US and Russia. The treaties that reduced that number from seventy thousand have expired or been withdrawn from, and for the first time in fifty years, there are no limits on what either side can build. Nuclear weapons exist to never be used, and the deterrence system has worked for eighty years, partly because of the treaties and partly because of individual decisions by people like Stanislav Petrov, who chose not to follow protocol when his instruments told him America had launched. Every country that gave up nuclear weapons, Ukraine and Libya, was later attacked or overthrown. Every country that kept them has been left alone. Iran is weeks away from being able to build a bomb, and if it does, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will follow. The system that kept the nuclear peace for eight decades is fraying. The weapons aren't going away. The agreements that managed them already have. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.