Nuclear weapons: Which countries have the most nuclear bombs and who decides who can and can't have them?
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New Statesman
4 days ago
- New Statesman
The history of nuclear science
Photo byThe detonation of the first atomic bombs exactly 80 years ago sparked the formation of one of the largest political movements of scientists in history. 'The profession of science, due to the special importance of the consequences of its good or bad use, carries with it special responsibilities over and above those of the ordinary duties of citizenship,' proclaimed the 1948 charter of the World Federation of Scientific Workers, led by the Nobel laureate and communist Frédéric Joliot-Curie. These responsibilities were not merely ethical but political: they obliged scientists actively to 'work against the diversion of scientific effort to war preparations' and 'to resist movements inspired by anti-scientific ideas', including 'racial inequality and the glorification of force'. In 1946, the Federation of American Scientists, founded by former Manhattan Project workers and like-minded physicists, released a book and an accompanying short film entitled One World or None, which argued for the necessity of world government to 'abolish war' and prevent the repetition of the atrocities their research had enabled. The aims of nuclear scientists addressing the public today may be considerably more modest. A pair of new books, by the particle physicist Frank Close and the nuclear chemist Tim Gregory, present the story of atomic power as one of heroic discovery, guided by an implacable desire to unravel the most profound mysteries of the material world, which happened to give the rest of humanity knowledge it could decide to wield for good or for evil. Scientists did their part, and they can't really be blamed for having done so. Now it's up to the rest of us. This is an apologetic narrative, ultimately, whether it emphasises the innocence of scientific work completed before awareness of its perils dawned – as in Close's Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age 1895-1965 – or nuclear energy, whose potentially utopian rewards might outweigh the harm of the bomb, as in Gregory's Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World. While their most admirable predecessors in nuclear science understood that they would need to change the world if they were to regain pride in their scientific achievements, today's atomic ambassadors seem determined to insist that whatever destructive forces their field has unleashed are ultimately someone else's problem. Destroyer of Worlds has at least the virtue of sobriety. As his book's title suggests, Close does not mince words about the threat of nuclear weapons, nor does he attempt to sequester the history of nuclear physics from its catastrophic military applications. Because Close never forgets that his story ends with hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians killed and the survival of the planet in jeopardy, he narrates the key scientific achievements surveyed in the book without the sensationalism or sentimentality so often found in popular histories of science. His respect for his readers' intelligence is uncommonly clear. It is less clear what exactly Close believes to be the implications of the fact that his tale of discovery culminates in profound human tragedy. For the most part, he seems to feel that it was basically an accident. 'Pursuit of this hidden power source began innocently and collaboratively only to be taken by world events in the 1930s as the spectre of fascism loomed,' he writes early on. Close reprises the refrain near the end of the book: 'Had it not been for the unfortunate collapse of society to fascism, nuclear power rather than nuclear weapons would have led the way.' Between these bookends, however, Close's scrupulous research piles up evidence that this judgement is far too simple. HG Wells, he notes, coined the phrase 'atomic bomb' in a 1914 novel, based on his amateur reading of early research reports on radioactivity. The New Zealand-born British physicist Ernest Rutherford almost immediately recognised the disturbing implications of his discovery that each atom's positive charge is concentrated in an extremely small and energetically potent nucleus. 'At the present time we have not found a method of dealing with these forces and personally I am very hopeful we should not discover it until man is living at peace with his neighbours,' Rutherford warned in 1916, when Hitler was still an infantryman in the Royal Bavarian Army. The idea that scientists toiled in unspoiled innocence before the rise of fascism would have come as news to anyone slain by machine guns or tanks or poison gas on the battlefields of the Great War. Nor is it the case that all nuclear scientists merely reacted to the advance of fascism from the outside, as it were. Close tends to downplay the actions of scientists who did collaborate actively with fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. Least excusable is Close's refusal to acknowledge the well-documented fascist and anti-Semitic convictions of Ettore Majorana, a theoretical physicist who collaborated with Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi. Close is enchanted by tales of the enigmatic Majorana's superlative genius, despite his sparse publication record, as well as the mystery of his unsolved disappearance in 1938. He suggests that while visiting Werner Heisenberg in Germany in 1933, Majorana 'had a political awakening as he experienced with horror the Nazis seizing power'. There is no citation for this claim, and I doubt that one could be provided. Majorana did write to his mother from Germany describing the Nazi persecution of communists and Jews, but he argued that this policy 'responds to a historical necessity'. He joined the Italian fascist party after his return from Germany and wrote positively about Hitler to the son of the Italian fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile. Fermi, whose wife was Jewish, did eventually leave fascist Italy after Mussolini officially allied with Nazi Germany and enacted a state policy of anti-Semitism. He was one of many refugees from the fascist nations who eventually joined the Manhattan Project, a fact that Close underscores many times. 'It is ironic that Hitler's actions were providing the Allies with the very scientists who would help defeat the Axis powers,' Close remarks. 'Having fled fascism, they would later play central scientific roles in plotting its downfall,' he writes elsewhere. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This would indeed be a pleasing irony if it were true, but it isn't. The Manhattan Project self-evidently played no role whatsoever in the defeat of Hitler. The atomic bomb did, of course, bring the fight against Japan to an end, but even those who defend the decision to use the bomb would concede that the ultimate outcome of the war was by that time no longer in doubt. While one might sympathise with the scientists who initially joined the Manhattan Project because they believed it was essential to beat Hitler to the bomb, it was already obvious by the end of 1944 – many months before the Trinity nuclear test detonation – that even if the Nazis had managed to figure out a functional design, there was no way they could possibly enrich enough uranium to construct a bomb before their inevitable defeat. At that point, however, only a single scientist left the Manhattan Project: Joseph Rotblat, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his disarmament work. Close discusses Rotblat's advocacy in a brief postscript, along with the work of Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, who helped the Soviet Union develop a hydrogen bomb but later also won a Nobel prize for his peace activism. (The postscript also includes, for some reason, the German chemist Otto Hahn, whose failed work for Hitler's nuclear programme during the war did not manage to win him a Nobel Peace Prize.) Close is correct that Rotblat and Sakharov are inspiring. But they are more than that: they exemplify the obligations of any scientist who helps create world-destroying technology. By entering the political fray, they were not going above and beyond the call of duty, helping the public clean up the mess it had made of their discoveries. They were atoning. Tim Gregory, for his part, thinks that nuclear science has precious little to atone for. He begins with a much breezier tour of the same scientific history that Close recounts, before reaching a similar conclusion: 'It just so happened that nuclear physics reached the brink of Promethean knowledge as war broke out in Europe.' For this reason, he feels, it is a bit unfair that nuclear weapons get brought up so often in discussions about what he really wants to celebrate, which is nuclear energy ('not the same thing'). Gregory does concede that nuclear bombs are unpleasant and that it would be quite unfortunate if the world's superpowers began to lob them at each other, but he has no doubt that 'developing the atomic bomb in the first place was necessary', since it was a 'race between the USA and Nazi Germany' and we can be 'glad the Americans won'. In fact, the Americans did no such thing. By the time of the Trinity test, the race really was over; Hitler's nuclear scientists had been in Allied captivity for over two months. Gregory hails the cessation of atmospheric nuclear testing in the early 1960s, although it is not entirely clear why, since he claims that the 'increase in background radiation' wrought by nuclear fallout around the globe was 'harmless'. This verdict is consistent with Gregory's overall position that radioactivity is generally much less hazardous to human health than we ordinarily suppose – a claim whose denial Gregory christens 'radiophobia'. In reality, there is expert consensus that atmospheric nuclear testing was responsible for, at minimum, tens of thousands of cancer cases in the US alone, since fallout did not merely settle in an innocuous even layer around the globe; it was more acutely concentrated in communities near testing sites. This omission makes it more difficult to marvel along with Gregory at the way the chemical signature of the spike and slow decline of radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere in the second half of the 20th century 'helps in the fight against wine forgeries'. Stories about such creative applications of nuclear technology – some of which, especially in medicine, really are astounding in their ingenuity and lifesaving potential – fill the last chapters of Going Nuclear. But most of the book is dedicated to Gregory's case for why nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy, can solve climate change. Gregory hits all the standard pro-nuclear talking points: renewable sources simply can't meet the world's energy needs, especially if the economic development of the Global South is to continue; safety concerns are overblown and rely on isolated horror stories, like Chernobyl, that don't reflect the industry's current standards and track record; if there were only the political will, we could adopt new technology that enables the recycling of nuclear fuel on a widespread scale, obviating worries about uranium scarcity. 'The hysterical opposition to nuclear power,' Gregory concludes, 'ruins our best shot at renouncing fossil fuels before 2050.' Gregory does himself a rhetorical disservice with this tone. Nuclear energy sceptics, many of them both thoughtful and highly credentialed, have replied cogently to previous iterations of all these assertions. Rather than engaging with their claims seriously, even if to ultimately reject them, Gregory instead dismisses nearly everyone who disagrees with him as stupid, mendacious, or simply deranged by 'radiophobia'. At other points it feels like he is trying to conceal the gaps in his arguments by bombarding readers with a flurry of facts and figures. He performs a series of calculations showing that the world's known reserves of uranium could power the planet entirely on nuclear energy, using conventional reactors, for about eight years. State-of-the-art technology mainly in operation today in France could stretch us to a decade, and new 'fast reactors' would make the supply last for 440 years. But the latter technology, by Gregory's own admission, 'never truly made it beyond the prototype phase' until recently. In other words, the hope of powering the entire world on nuclear energy sustainably rests on nascent technology that has never been commercialised on a large scale. The reason it hasn't is not especially mysterious. 'Most of the cost of nuclear electricity', as Gregory observes, comes from 'the up-front cost of building power stations', which is enormous. Gregory bemoans 'today's climate of short-sightedness', since 'epic nuclear programmes take time'. That is surely true. But short-sightedness is not just a mindset problem with which we happen to be afflicted right now; it is a structural feature of our political-economic order. Private capital has little incentive to shoulder colossal short-term costs in the hope – no more than that, since the technology involved is unproven – of long-term repayment, when so many opportunities for short-term profit, juicing share prices and financing executive bonuses, still abound. It is no coincidence that the few nations that Gregory celebrates for their adventurous nuclear programmes have a long history of state economic leadership, such as France, China and the Nordic social democracies. But Gregory prefers nuclear energy to renewables precisely because it seems better suited to preserving the economic status quo. He finds an elective affinity between enthusiasm for renewables and the desire to ''de-grow' our economies and debase our living standards in the name of environmental protection', a vision which he rejects unequivocally. Gregory, in contrast, sees nuclear energy as the heart of an environmentalism committed to the values of 'wealth, prosperity and energy abundance'. Empowering the state at the expense of capital need not spell an end to wealth and prosperity, but Gregory does not seem to recognise that actualising his nuclear dreams worldwide would require radical political-economic change. He asserts, for instance, that 'private sector entrepreneurship' will be essential to the widespread adoption of 'fast reactors'. From the Manhattan Project to the present, it is hard to think of a force that has contributed less to the development of nuclear power. The spectre of Christopher Nolan's 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer haunts both Destroyer of Worlds and Going Nuclear. Close writes about Robert Oppenheimer's reputation as 'the father of the atomic bomb' with palpable frustration; he considers the moniker 'wrong on many fronts'. The first time he remarks on Oppenheimer's chain smoking it adds colour; the second time it feels petty. Gregory, for his part, frames his account of the history of nuclear science by repeating almost verbatim and without attribution the opening text of Nolan's film: 'Prometheus wrested fire from the Olympian gods and gave it to humankind.' He omits the next bit, about being punished for all eternity. It is easy to understand why nuclear scientists might regret that the most iconic image of their guild is now Cillian Murphy's dismayed face in close-up, contemplating the end of the world. But this image became iconic because the sight of a scientist displaying real moral and political seriousness, even in fictionalised form, has become all too rare. We hunger for scientists who recognise that they exist within the same webs of interdependent responsibility in which we are all enmeshed. 'I'm going back to the lab now,' Gregory writes at the end of Going Nuclear. 'Over to you.' Prometheus had more solidarity with the recipients of his ambiguous gifts. Erik Baker teaches the history of science at Harvard University and is the author of 'Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America' Going Nuclear Tim Gregory Bodley Head, 384pp, £25 Destroyer of Worlds Frank Close Allen Lane, £25, 336pp Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Palestine Action and the distortion of terrorism] Related This article appears in the 07 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2025
Evening Standard
24-06-2025
- Evening Standard
Nuclear weapons: Which countries have the most nuclear bombs and who decides who can and can't have them?
'The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world, which had lasted since the end of the cold war, is coming to an end', said Hans M. Kristensen, Associate Senior Fellow with SIPRI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme and Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).
Spectator
21-06-2025
- Spectator
Why is China rushing to grow its nuclear arsenal?
China is growing its nuclear arsenal at a faster pace than any other country on the planet, according to new figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). It estimates that Beijing now has more than 600 nuclear warheads and is adding about 100 per year to its stockpile. That means that by 2035, it will have more than 1,500 warheads, still only a third of the arsenal of each of Russia and the US, but nevertheless an enormous increase and a marked shift away from its proclaimed policy of 'minimum deterrence'. To facilitate this expanding arsenal, China is building fields of new missile silos in its western desert regions. The Federation of American Scientists, which identified the silos via satellite imagery, has described them as 'the most significant expansion of the Chinese nuclear arsenal ever.' China is engaged in one of the largest military build-ups ever seen during peacetime The Pentagon believes China is planning to quadruple its nuclear weapons stockpile by 2030, and its fears have been further heightened by People's Liberation Army (PLA) tests of nuclear-capable hypersonic weapons designed to evade America's nuclear defences. One test involved the launch of a rocket into space, which circled the globe before releasing into orbit a highly manoeuvrable hypersonic glider. The nuclear-capable glider – which has been likened to a weaponised space shuttle – had the ability to surf along the earth's atmosphere before powering down to its target at up to five times the speed of sound (hence the hypersonic). Hypersonic weapons are far more difficult to detect and destroy than traditional ballistic missiles. This week, China's foreign ministry spokesperson insisted: 'China has always adhered to the nuclear strategy of self-defence, always maintained its nuclear forces at the minimum level required for national security, and has not participated in the arms race.' This claim is almost as hackneyed as that of China's 'peaceful rise', but understanding China's evolving military doctrine is especially challenging because Beijing 'is refusing to take part in nuclear arms control talks. China last year suspended talks over arms control and nuclear proliferation with the US ostensibly because of American arms sales to Taiwan. However, Beijing has always been a reluctant participant. It is engaged in one of the largest military build-ups ever seen during peacetime, yet there are none of the protocols and little of the depth of mutual knowledge about capabilities and intentions that existed and provided a level of stability during the last Cold War with the Soviet Union. Western strategists believe that one aim of the rapid nuclear build-up is to deter America from coming to the defence of Taiwan, which China claims as its own, and which it has repeatedly threatened to invade. The thinly disguised message to Washington is that America is deluding itself if it thinks a conflict over Taiwan could be contained to the immediate area and not endanger the American homeland. Trying to make sense of China's military doctrine is made all the more challenging by an ongoing purge at the top of the PLA and a heightened level of intrigue surrounding both the army and the Chinese Communist party (CCP). Earlier this year, General He Weidong, the number-two officer in the PLA and a member of the CCP's 24-strong politburo, was removed from his post. This followed the disappearance of Miao Hua, a navy admiral and one of six members (along with He) of the party's powerful central military commission, which is chaired by President Xi Jinping. Miao was also head of the PLA's political works department – charged with ensuring CCP control over the military. The PLA is a party organisation, and in the military pecking order, Miao was regarded as more powerful even than defence minister Dong Jun. Rumours have also swirled that Dong himself has been under investigation. He appears to have survived, at least for now, but if deposed, he would be the third successive defence minister to face corruption charges. China's rocket force, the most secretive and sensitive branch of China's military responsible for overseeing in part all those shiny new nukes, has also been the target of an extensive purge. Those targeted included the two heads of the force. Among others purged have been a navy commander responsible for the South China Sea and several others responsible for procuring equipment – long a notoriously corrupt part of the military. When Xi came to power in 2012, he pledged to clean up the PLA, which ran a business empire so big that preparing for war often appeared to be a secondary concern. In spite (or possibly because of) Xi's efforts, the graft only seems to have got worse – though it should be noted that 'corruption' is frequently used as a catch-all and a pretext for the removal of those considered insufficiently loyal to the leader. Because many of those now being targeted include Xi's hand-picked officials, it will inevitably be seen as an indictment of his abilities and judgement. This week's figures from SIPRI certainly confirm the worrying extent of China's nuclear ambitions. For the country's top brass charged with wielding these fearsome weapons, however, navigating the corridors of power at the pinnacle of Xi Jinping's capricious CCP is proving considerably more dangerous than the battlefield.
