Country position on nuclear weapons
What you should know about this indicator
- A country is classified as not considering nuclear weapons if it neither considers, pursues, or possesses nuclear weapons.
- A country is classified as considering nuclear weapons if its leaders explore whether it is possible and desirable for them to attempt to acquire nuclear weapons, or they work to increase their nuclear weapons capabilities, but without launching a dedicated program.
- A country is classified as pursuing nuclear weapons if it has an active program to acquire nuclear weapons or to obtain the ability to construct them on short notice.
- A country is classified as possessing nuclear weapons if it has a nuclear-explosive device that it can deliver. Conducting an explosive nuclear test is therefore neither sufficient nor necessary.
- Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine are not classified as possessing nuclear weapons because they never had operational control of the nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet Union.
More Data on Nuclear Weapons
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
- The information on the number and status of nuclear weapons was manually extracted from Bleek (2017). For recent years, the data has been double-checked with information from the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
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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: Country position on nuclear weapons”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2024) - “Nuclear Weapons”. Data adapted from Bleek, Nuclear Threat Initiative. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260325-171315/grapher/country-position-nuclear-weapons.html [online resource] (archived on March 25, 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:
Bleek (2017); Nuclear Threat Initiative (2024) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
Bleek (2017); Nuclear Threat Initiative (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Country position on nuclear weapons” [dataset]. Bleek, “Spread of Nuclear Weapons”; Nuclear Threat Initiative, “Nuclear Threat Initiative Overview” [original data]. Retrieved April 4, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260325-171315/grapher/country-position-nuclear-weapons.html (archived on March 25, 2026).Download
Quick download
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/country-position-nuclear-weapons.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/country-position-nuclear-weapons.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/country-position-nuclear-weapons.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/country-position-nuclear-weapons.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/country-position-nuclear-weapons.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/country-position-nuclear-weapons.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/country-position-nuclear-weapons.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/country-position-nuclear-weapons.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear