Warheads of Major Powers Put at 50,000 : U.S. Has A-Weapons in 28 States, 8 Nations, Researchers Declare

The world’s five major nuclear powers have now stockpiled or deployed more than 50,000 nuclear warheads, according to a book published today.

The United States has deployed or stored its nuclear weapons in 28 states, on the island of Guam and in eight foreign countries, including Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Britain, West Germany and South Korea, according to the book, “Nuclear Battlefields.”

South Carolina has the most warheads, with New York second and North Dakota third, authors William Arkin and Richard Fieldhouse said.

The Soviet Union appears to have deployed nuclear warheads in at least four foreign countries--Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland. Britain has some nuclear weapons based in West Germany, but China and France--the other nuclear powers--keep all their weapons within their borders, the authors wrote.

Infrastructure Vital

“More important than the weapons themselves,” say the authors, is the infrastructure of research and production facilities, radar sites, communication and surveillance centers, weather stations, observatories and oceanographic and seismic laboratories that would be needed to support a nuclear war.

Such facilities, the book says, have created “a new geography.”

“The tentacles of the nuclear infrastructure are so obscure that most countries do not understand their own contribution to the arms race. There is a pervasive lack of understanding--even within the military--of the pervasiveness of the arms race.”

Arkin is the director of the Nuclear Weapons Research Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal, nonprofit think tank that has frequently criticized Pentagon and Reagan Administration policies. Fieldhouse is a research associate at the institute.

Arkin said he had been gathering the material for the book for 10 years. His conclusions and factual details, he said, were based on documents obtained from congressional hearings and through the Freedom of Information Act, interviews with government officials and material leaked by sources.

“I’m satisfied we’re very close (on numbers and details),” Arkin added. “But I would be more than happy to publish any corrections which the Pentagon might want to offer.”

The Pentagon declined comment.