There are still almost 18,000 nuclear weapons distributed among the world’s nine nuclear-armed states (Table 1), almost 2,000 of them in a state of high operational readiness. With luck, we could remain safe from their re-use for another six-seven decades. More likely, the numbers of actors with nuclear weapons will grow in the absence of their total elimination and they will be used again – by design, accident, miscalculation or unauthorized launch – with catastrophic consequences for all forms of life on planet Earth.