A streak of light trails off into the night sky as the US military test fires an unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at Vandenberg Air Force Base, some 130 miles (209 kms) northwest of Los Angeles, California early on May 3, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / RINGO CHIU (Photo credit should read RINGO CHIU/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

As global arms control agreements are terminated or called into question by the politics of arms racing, building and developing nuclear weapons is a big business, and growing larger.

A new report by the Nobel Prize winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) documents $119 billion in expenditures on nuclear weapons in 2025, over 19% more than the prior year. More than half of that amount – $69 billion – was spent by the United States. The figures in the new study are no doubt conservative, as governments – including the United States along with closed societies like Russia and China – are not fully transparent about their nuclear weapons spending. The United States has classified nuclear weapons research of an unknown value.

In addition, the potentially enormously expensive Golden Dome missile defense program could ratchet up global nuclear expenditures further if adversaries assess that the combination of offensive U.S. forces that could attack their nuclear sites with a defensive system that could intercept what’s left after a first strike, would leave them vulnerable to attack. So, in a sense, Golden Dome is a defensive system that could be used for an offensive purpose – the shield of defensive systems that allows the United States to use the sword of offensive nuclear arms with impunity. Even if this is a low probability event, militaries deal in worst case scenarios, so moving forward on Golden Dome – including putting interceptors in space that would be capable of knocking out the other side’s satellites – could spark an acceleration of an already raging nuclear arms race, while increasing the risks of a nuclear confrontation by accident or by design.

The biggest beneficiaries of the U.S. buildup are Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for both the new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Sentinel, and the new nuclear-armed bomber. General Dynamics makes ballistic missile firing submarines at well over a billion dollars each, while Lockheed Martin makes submarine-launched ballistic missiles and RTX makes nuclear-armed cruise missiles. The nuclear warhead complex – as opposed to the vehicles designed to deliver the warheads – includes facilities run in whole or in part by Honeywell, Bechtel, Jacobs Engineering, and even universities like Texas A&M (involved in the consortium that runs Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory), and UC-Berkeley, which is involved in managing both Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear labs.

Then there are the states that house ICBM bases or substantial work on the new ICBM – Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. The senators from these states comprise the Senate ICBM Coalition, which has successfully fended off efforts to reduce nuclear weapons spending, or, in recent years, efforts to reduce the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

There are similar economic or bureaucratic incentives in favor of nuclear weapons production in other major nuclear states like the UK, France, China and Russia, but those nations combined spend less on nuclear weapons research, testing, and production than the United States does, as the ICAN report notes.

According to an annual assessment by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the risk of a nuclear conflict is the highest it has been in decades, exacerbated by the fact that the countries with the two largest nuclear arsenals, the United States and Russia, are barely speaking to each other about these issues, if at all.

Reversing the drive for more, and more expensive nuclear weapons, with fewer guardrails on their use, will require concerted action by citizens of each of the major nuclear weapons states. A majority of the world’s nations have either ratified or signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, but the major nuclear players are conspicuously absent from the list of countries that support the nuclear ban treaty. It will also be necessary to reduce the economic incentives for continuing with nuclear business as usual by developing alternative economic options for communities that depend on nuclear weapons research development and production to bolster their local economies.

These are daunting tasks, but a robust nuclear arms race in the midst of a decline in arms control limits. This kind of reversal has been achieved before, as in the 1980s, when a major nuclear buildup was pushed back, treaties limiting nuclear weapons production and deployment were hatched, and Ronald Reagan declared that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.

These are different times, so the tactics that worked in the 1980s may not work now. What is needed is a culture shift that produces a global effort to reduce and ultimately eliminate nuclear arsenals, with everything from in person rallies, to lobbying of governments, to pushing institutions to divest from companies that profit from the nuclear buildup, to flooding any and every social media platform with anti-nuclear messages. Until that time, the nuclear weapons business will no doubt continue to thrive, with big dividends for the companies involved in researching, developing, and building them.