The Incredibly Increasing Nuclear Budget

Costs for U.S. nuclear weapons are exploding. This is unsustainable.

This week, I recorded an interview with Annie Jacobsen about her new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, that will air on CSPAN’s Book TV next weekend. We talked for an hour but I realized later that we had left out one aspect of the enormous nuclear arsenals that we and the Russians still have: The Cost.

It is an under-discussed issue. Most analysis of nuclear risks concentrate on strategy, policy and intentions. They leave out what for me is one of the main drivers of our nuclear posture: that corporations make billions of dollars selling these weapons.

Strategy is now a thin veneer of justification for a collection of legacy systems and new programs promoted for financial profit and political advantage. The entire process is guided by an army of 775 (!) defense lobbyists in Washington. Defense corporations donate generously to members of Congress that oversee their budgets. They hire military officers and procurement officials leaving government service, ensuring that a lucrative trip through the revolving door factors into any nuclear official’s decisions.

This week, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation released its Defense Budget Request Briefing Book. It reveals some eye-popping numbers for the nuclear complex. The corporations making nuclear weapons are about to get a whole lot richer. And American taxpayers are going to pay more than they ever have to support a nuclear force designed for the Cold War.

$70 billion for nuclear weapons, plus almost $30 billion for missile defense.

The Biden Administration gave Congress a FY2025 request for $895 billion in military spending. That is a $9 billion increase over last year.

To put this into perspective, in 2001, before we began an unnecessary 20-year “War on Terror,” the United States spent $300 billion total on military programs. We now spend triple that amount, even though the ill-fated wars begun after September 11 have ended or wound down.

“By any measure—but particularly in this election year and in this era of competing budget priorities—that is an enormous amount of money that will surely raise many eyebrows,” note Brookings experts Michael O’Hanlong and Alejandra Rocha.

But anyone’s eyes will really pop when they see the enormous funding for new nuclear weapons. The Biden Administration is asking for a whopping $69 billion for new bombers, submarines, missiles and warheads — a $12.5 billion increase over last year.

This is just the beginning of a dramatic increase in nuclear spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we will spend $750 billion on nuclear weapons from 2023 to 2032 - an average of $75 billion a year.

If $75 billion is the average annual cost, that means that we can expect annual nuclear budgets to soar to $80 - $100 billion or more during this decade.

The Center provides a chart of some of the major programs. The new Columbia-class nuclear ballistic submarine alone will cost almost $10 billion this year, a staggering increase of almost $4 billion from last year.

Nuclear Weapons Spending for Select Programs

In addition, we will spend almost $30 billion on missile defense weapons. Some of these weapons are vital to intercept short- and medium-range missiles. We are still wasting almost $3 billion a year, however, on a national missile defense system that doesn’t work and never will. (See my very first substack on the anniversary of this failed program.)

Missile Defense Funding for Select Programs

In total, this almost $100 billion for new nuclear weapons and related programs is more than any nation save China spends on its entire military. It dwarfs, for example, the estimated $86 billion that Russia spends annually. And Russia has the third-largest military budget in the world.

There is almost nothing we can do this year to stop this insane spending. The game is rigged. There is little dissent within the Biden Administration over the size of these programs. It is certainly not something Democrats want to have a fight over in an election year. Most members of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees that oversee the budget are unlikely to do anything that risks their millions in campaign contributions from defense corporations, thereby ensuring that these companies will remain among the most profitable in the world.

But we can at least bear witness to this waste of taxpayer money. We can raise it every time someone argues for cutting domestic programs. We can plan for the future by building coalitions and analysis to support deep cuts in 2025 and beyond.

The battle this year is already lost. Winning the budget war will require years of planning and battles to come.