State Department confirms FAS warhead estimate

The State Department has confirmed the estimate made by the Ploughshares-funded Federation of American Scientists in a blog by Hans Kristensen, saying that the U.S. had already reached the limit of 2,200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads set by the 2002 Moscow Treaty. The confirmation occurred in a fact sheet published on the State Department’s web site: “As of May 2009, the United States had cut its number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 2,126.” This is a reduction of 77 warheads probably reflects the ongoing retirement of the W62 warhead from the Minuteman III ICBM force, scheduled for completion later this year. The total U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile includes approximately 5,200 warheads.