Our World
in Data
Oxford Martin School logoUniversity of Oxford logoGlobal Change Data Lab logo
Data

Estimated number of nuclear warheads deliverable in first strike

What you should know about this indicator

  • The exact number of countries' warheads is secret, and the estimates are based on publicly available information, historical records, and experts' estimates.
  • The warheads included here are strategic ones — those designed for use away from the battlefield, such as against military bases, arms industries, or infrastructure.
  • Only those strategic warheads are included that could be deployed — those that could be carried by ballistic missiles, bombers, and submarines in one strike.
Source
Suh - The Strategic Nuclear Forces Dataset v2.0 (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 15, 2025
Date range
1945–2010
Unit
warheads

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Suh – The Strategic Nuclear Forces Dataset

This dataset describes times-series-cross-sectional information on all nuclear-armed states' strategic nuclear forces, and provides three indicators: the deliverable strategic warhead count, the equivalent megatonnage (EMT) index, and the counter military potential (CMP) index.

Retrieved on
May 15, 2025
Retrieved from
https://kyungwonsuh.weebly.com/datasets.html
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Kyungwon Suh - The Strategic Nuclear Forces Dataset, monadic data (2024).
Suh, Kyungwon. 2022. “Nuclear Balance and the Initiation of Nuclear Crises: Does Superiority Matter?” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 60, No. 2 (March): 337-351. Doi:10.1177/00223433211067899.

This dataset describes times-series-cross-sectional information on all nuclear-armed states' strategic nuclear forces, and provides three indicators: the deliverable strategic warhead count, the equivalent megatonnage (EMT) index, and the counter military potential (CMP) index.

Retrieved on
May 15, 2025
Retrieved from
https://kyungwonsuh.weebly.com/datasets.html
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Kyungwon Suh - The Strategic Nuclear Forces Dataset, monadic data (2024).
Suh, Kyungwon. 2022. “Nuclear Balance and the Initiation of Nuclear Crises: Does Superiority Matter?” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 60, No. 2 (March): 337-351. Doi:10.1177/00223433211067899.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Estimated number of nuclear warheads deliverable in first strike”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2024) - “Nuclear Weapons”. Data adapted from Suh. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260518-090244/grapher/estimated-nuclear-warheads-deliverable-in-first-strike.html [online resource] (archived on May 18, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Suh - The Strategic Nuclear Forces Dataset v2.0 (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Suh - The Strategic Nuclear Forces Dataset v2.0 (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Estimated number of nuclear warheads deliverable in first strike” [dataset]. Suh, “The Strategic Nuclear Forces Dataset v2.0” [original data]. Retrieved May 18, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260518-090244/grapher/estimated-nuclear-warheads-deliverable-in-first-strike.html (archived on May 18, 2026).

Download

Quick download

You can download the visualization as an image or download the chart data.