Early Tuesday morning, while most Americans were still sleeping, the U.S. completed negotiations on a historic nuclear deal with Iran.
President Obama stated that the deal will block "every pathway to a nuclear weapon" for Iran. In exchange, the U.S. and other E.U. countries agreed to lift international oil and economic sanctions.
Nuclear disarmament has long been one of President Obama's top foreign policy priorities. In fact, in his first major speech on foreign policy in 2009, President Obama described his vision of a "world without nuclear weapons." How will the Iranian accord affect this long-term goal of global nuclear disarmament?
Using data from the Federation of American Scientists and the WISE Uranium Project, InsideGov mapped the nuclear arsenal of each country around the world. As the graphic below shows, Russia leads the world in nuclear weapons with 7,500 warheads. The U.S. is a close second with 7,200. France is a distant third with just 300 nuclear warheads. Overall, there are nine countries with nuclear weapons.
However, looking at the nuclear arsenal of each country only tells half of the story. It's also necessary to consider nuclear capacity. Iran, for example, does not have nuclear weapons; but it does have uranium enrichment facilities which could be used to manufacture such weapons.
Although they do not have warheads, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Iran, Japan and the Netherlands all have uranium enrichment facilities. While the new accord will technically remove Iran from this list, there is still significant progress to be made in global disarmament. President Obama will need to convince allies and rivals alike to reduce their nuclear programs. But his biggest challenge might be convincing the U.S.