Money Spending on Nukes increased since 2019
ICAN ’20 The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is a global campaign working to mobilize people in all countries to inspire, persuade and pressure their governments to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. ICAN is comprised of more than 500 partner organisations in over 100 countries. ICAN Policy and Research Coordinator Alicia Sanders-Zakre was the primary author of this report. She directs and coordinates research on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons and general nuclear weapons policy. Previously, she was a research assistant at the Arms Control Association and at the Brookings Institution and she has published over 100 news articles, editorials and reports on nuclear weapons. (https://www.icanw.org/global_nuclear_weapons_spending_2020)//EH
These estimates (rounded to one decimal point) include nuclear warhead and nuclear capable delivery systems operating costs and development where these expenditures are publically available and are based on a reasonable percentage of total military spending on nuclear weapons when more detailed budget data is not available. ICAN urges all nuclear-armed states to be transparent about nuclear weapons expenditures to allow for more accurate reporting on global nuclear expenditures and better government accountability. Due to lack of reliable and consistent information, these estimates do not include the costs to remediate the environment contaminated by nuclear weapons or to compensate victims of nuclear weapon use and testing, although these are also important markers of the added financial and human cost of nuclear weapons.1,2 A 2011 Global Zero cost estimate which added “unpaid/deferred environmental and health costs, missile defences assigned to defend against nuclear weapons, nuclear threat reduction and incident management” found that this “full” cost of global nuclear arsenals was over 50% higher than just the cost of nuclear weapons system maintenance and development.3 The methodology and sources used to calculate each country’s spending on nuclear weapons in this report is outlined in the following section.
The nuclear-armed states spent nearly three-quarters of one hundred billion dollars in 2019 on building and maintaining nuclear warheads and delivery systems. The incalculable human and environmental costs of nuclear weapons only add to this shocking figure. From 2018 to 2019, there was an estimated $7.1 billion increase in nuclear weapon spending, and these totals will only continue to rise in the next decade according to documented nuclear weapon programmed and budgets in several nuclear-armed countries.