Follow us on social

World spending on nukes explodes to more than $90 billion

World spending on nukes explodes to more than $90 billion

The question is, what benefits, your safety or big business?

Reporting | Global Crises

Worldwide spending on nuclear weapons rose by $10.8 billion between 2022 and 2023 with 80% of the increase coming from the United States, according to a new report released on Monday by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

The $10.8 billion increase brings annual global spending on nuclear weapons up to $91.4 billion. From 2019 to 2023, $387 billion has been spent on nuclear weapons.

“By comparison, the World Food Programme Executive Director stated in 2021 that to end world hunger, countries could spend $40 billion per year through 2030, which is a total of $360 billion over nine years,” said the report, “Surge: 2023 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending.” ICAN notes that sum is $27 billion less than what the U.S., China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan spent on their nuclear arsenals in just five years.

ICAN points to weapons companies as profiting off the surge in spending on nukes, noting that the top 20 companies working on nuclear weapons earned more than $31 billion from their nuke related work in 2023. And “[t]here are at least $335 billion in outstanding nuclear weapons contracts to these companies, some of which continue for more than a decade,” said the report.

Honeywell International, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics topped the list of companies profiting from nuclear weapons expenditures.

That flood of public funds to private contractors was coupled by significant spending by these companies on efforts to shape the debate around government spending. The companies spent $118 million lobbying governments in the U.S. and France in 2023 and donated more than $6 million to think tanks researching and writing about nuclear weapons.

Lockheed Martin contributed to the most think tanks, including: Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, Chatham House, Center for a New American Security, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hudson Institute, and Observer Research Foundation.

The increased spending on nuclear weapons hasn’t corresponded to an increase in the absolute number of nuclear warheads, a number that has continued to decline since the end of the Cold War, but the number of nuclear weapons deployed for use with missiles and aircraft has gone up.

“While the global total of nuclear warheads continues to fall as cold war-era weapons are gradually dismantled, regrettably we continue to see year-on-year increases in the number of operational nuclear warheads,’ said Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Director Dan Smith, in a press release citing data from SIPRI’s own report on nuclear weapons, also released on Monday. “This trend seems likely to continue and probably accelerate in the coming years and is extremely concerning.”

SIPRI points to tensions over the Ukraine and Gaza wars weakening nuclear diplomacy. Last year, Russia suspended its participation in the last remaining treaty limiting Russia and U.S. strategic nuclear forces and the U.S. suspended sharing its own nuclear weapons data with Russia as required by the treaty.

SIPRI also cites Russia’s repeated threats of using nuclear weapons and the Israel-Hamas war, which upended an informal agreement between the U.S. and Iran to de-escalate tensions. That conflict has also undermined efforts to engage Israel — which has never acknowledged its nuclear weapons program — in the Conference on the Establishment of a Middle East Zone Free of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction, which has contributed to an overall weakening of nuclear diplomacy.

While nuclear weapons contractors are enjoying new contracts of billions of dollars in public funds, the overall outlook for constraining the use of nuclear weapons is looking much worse.

“We have not seen nuclear weapons playing such a prominent role in international relations since the cold war,” said Wilfred Wan, Director of SIPRI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme at the release of the new report. “It is hard to believe that barely two years have passed since the leaders of the five largest nuclear-armed states jointly reaffirmed that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’”


Vivi Petru

Reporting | Global Crises
Ratcliffe Gabbard
Top image credit: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe join a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and his intelligence team in the Situation Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 21, 2025. The White House/Handout via REUTERS

Trump's use and misuse of Iran intel

Middle East

President Donald Trump has twice, within the space of a week, been at odds with U.S. intelligence agencies on issues involving Iran’s nuclear program. In each instance, Trump was pushing his preferred narrative, but the substantive differences in the two cases were in opposite directions.

Before the United States joined Israel’s attack on Iran, Trump dismissed earlier testimony by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, in which she presented the intelligence community’s judgment that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” Questioned about this testimony, Trump said, “she’s wrong.”

keep readingShow less
Mohammad Bin Salman Trump Ayatollah Khomenei
Top photo credit: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (President of the Russian Federation/Wikimedia Commons); U.S. President Donald Trump (Gage Skidmore/Flickr) and Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei (Wikimedia Commons)

Let's make a deal: Enrichment path that both Iran, US can agree on

Middle East

The recent conflict, a direct confrontation that pitted Iran against Israel and drew in U.S. B-2 bombers, has likely rendered the previous diplomatic playbook for Tehran's nuclear program obsolete.

The zero-sum debates concerning uranium enrichment that once defined that framework now represent an increasingly unworkable approach.

Although a regional nuclear consortium had been previously advanced as a theoretical alternative, the collapse of talks as a result of military action against Iran now positions it as the most compelling path forward for all parties.

Before the war, Iran was already suggesting a joint uranium enrichment facility with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Iranian soil. For Iran, this framework could achieve its primary goal: the preservation of a domestic nuclear program and, crucially, its demand to maintain some enrichment on its own territory. The added benefit is that it embeds Iran within a regional security architecture that provides a buffer against unilateral attack.

For Gulf actors, it offers unprecedented transparency and a degree of control over their rival-turned-friend’s nuclear activities, a far better outcome than a possible covert Iranian breakout. For a Trump administration focused on deals, it offers a tangible, multilateral framework that can be sold as a blueprint for regional stability.

keep readingShow less
Trump Netanyahu
Top image credit: White House April 7, 2025

Polls: Americans don't support Trump's war on Iran

Military Industrial Complex

While there are serious doubts about the accuracy of President Donald Trump’s claims about the effectiveness of his attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, the U.S./Israeli war on Iran has provided fresh and abundant evidence of widespread opposition to war in the United States.

With a tenuous ceasefire currently holding, several nationwide surveys suggest Trump’s attack, which plunged the country into yet another offensive war in the Middle East, has been broadly unpopular across the country.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.