How Many Nuclear Weapons Does Israel Have? 2026 Estimates

The most widely cited figure is about 90 warheads. SIPRI’s Yearbook 2026, released on June 8, puts Israel’s stockpile at 90 in January 2026, unchanged from January 2025. The FAS Status of World Nuclear Forces table gives the same 90, all of them “reserve/nondeployed”.

Both counts come from the same team of analysts, Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda, and both work backwards from the fissile material. The International Panel on Fissile Materials estimates that Israel held about 0.9 tonnes of plutonium, give or take 0.1 tonnes, at the beginning of 2025. That is more than 90 warheads would need, so the material could in theory support a larger arsenal. SIPRI’s estimate sits at the lower end of the published range: other analysts have suggested as many as 300 warheads, and older claims ran to 400. In a 2014 assessment, FAS called claims of 200 to 400 exaggerated and tied its own lower count to the number of missiles and aircraft Israel can field.

Every one of these numbers is an estimate. Israel publishes nothing, and SIPRI states plainly that its Israeli figures “come with a considerable degree of uncertainty”.

Israel keeps a policy of deliberate ambiguity, known in Hebrew as amimut: it neither confirms nor denies the arsenal. Its formal line, repeated by successive prime ministers, is that Israel will not be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East.

The policy was settled at a meeting between President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir on September 26, 1969. No written record of that meeting survives, but U.S. documents published by the National Security Archive show the understanding that followed: Israel would not test, declare or display a bomb, and Washington would stop pressing Israel over its program. The same documents indicate that Israel already had a nuclear device by 1967. In February 1970, Israel’s ambassador Yitzhak Rabin told Henry Kissinger that Israel had no intention of signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It never has.

The silence has been broken from outside. On October 5, 1986, The Sunday Times published photographs and testimony from Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at the Dimona site, which led analysts to conclude that Israel had produced at least 100 warheads. Vanunu was abducted by Israeli agents in Rome, convicted of treason and espionage and served 18 years in prison. In November 2023, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said on the radio that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was “one way”. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the remark detached from reality and suspended him from cabinet meetings.

Israel is believed to have a small triad: aircraft, land-based ballistic missiles and submarine-launched cruise missiles. SIPRI’s breakdown, published in the nuclear forces chapter of its 2025 Yearbook, assigns roughly 50 warheads to missiles, 30 to aircraft and 10 to submarines.

Jericho ballistic missiles carry the largest share. SIPRI estimates 25 Jericho II missiles, with a range of more than 1,500 kilometres, and 25 Jericho III missiles, with a range of more than 4,000 kilometres, and believes the Jericho III is gradually replacing the older model. A longer-range Jericho with a new solid rocket motor may be in development, and Israel tested a missile propulsion system in 2024 that SIPRI says may belong to the Jericho family.

Aircraft come second. Israel has about 125 combat jets that could in principle carry a nuclear bomb, 100 F-16I Sufa and 25 F-15 fighters, but SIPRI estimates that only about 50 of them, 25 F-16Is and all 25 F-15s, have a nuclear strike role. SIPRI puts the F-16I’s range at 1,600 kilometres and the F-15’s at 4,450 kilometres. One U.S. official has privately called Israel’s F-15s its “nuclear squadron”.

The sea leg is the least certain. Israel’s Dolphin-class submarines have four specially designed 650 mm tubes beside their six standard ones, and SIPRI believes these could launch nuclear-armed Popeye Turbo cruise missiles with a range of under 1,500 kilometres. SIPRI estimates that five boats could carry up to 20 such missiles between them, with 10 warheads assigned. INS Drakon, which arrived at Haifa in September, appears to have an added vertical launch system, though SIPRI says it is unclear what it would fire. Germany, which built the boats, has denied that they can carry nuclear warheads.

Dimona is where Israel’s plutonium comes from. The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, in the Negev desert south-east of the town of Dimona, houses a heavy water reactor that France helped Israel build from the late 1950s, at a time when Paris and Jerusalem were close military partners. The reactor is not under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, and IPFM believes it may now run mainly to make tritium, a gas that boosts the yield of nuclear weapons.

The site is growing. In September 2025 the Associated Press published Planet Labs satellite images showing construction intensifying on a large new structure in a pit first dug around 2018 or 2019. All seven experts the AP consulted linked the work to the weapons program, and three of them judged it to be a new heavy water reactor. SIPRI’s Yearbook 2026 reports that Israel stepped up construction at the new site during 2025 and counts Israel among the nine states modernising their arsenals.

Israel holds the second-smallest arsenal of the nine nuclear-armed states. SIPRI’s January 2026 military stockpile estimates are: Russia 4,400, the United States 3,700, China 620, France 290, the United Kingdom 225, India 190, Pakistan 170, Israel 90 and North Korea about 60. Of the world’s estimated 12,187 warheads, Israel holds less than 1 percent, while Russia and the United States together hold about 86 percent.

Israel is also the only one of the nine with no confirmed nuclear test, and the only one that does not acknowledge its weapons. Iran is not on SIPRI’s list. Its missile force is conventional, and how many of those missiles it has left since the war began is a separate question. For a nuclear-armed comparison closer to Europe, the UK and France’s first joint nuclear exercise shows how two declared powers practise air-delivered strikes.