Most people think that the atomic holocaust has gone away. Quite to the contrary. The nuclear powers have still way too many big crackers - so much firepower to kill us all several times over.

Russia and the USA both are planning to update their nuclear arsenal. China, Pakistan and India are new powers and constantly building new nukes. France and Britain certainly will upgrade their arsenal sometime.

Some of the nukes in service range from modern land- and submarine-based ICBM warheads to bombs dropped from planes and smaller so called tactical nukes.

Both Russia and the US have many old nukes and delivery system, so I don’t think that all 20.000 of them are operational. And modern ICBM carry several warheads at once.

China has LESS than 500 nukes  so far.

I didn’t include North Korea, because I couldn’t find any ‘good’ numbers. But I doubt they have more than 10-20.

This may sound cynical: I would say that up to 100 warheads for smaller nuclear powers are ‘understandable’ as a deterrent. Everything over 500 is madness. The US and Russia (plus China and India) as huge countries and powers should be ‘happy’ with about 2000 each …

You also have to understand that keeping up an atomic force costs a lot of money: security, training, inspections and plus warning and delivery systems.