$82,900,000,000 per year, $157,664 per minute...

Editorial Comments, Tom Unterrainer

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) report Wasted: 2022 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending, was recently published. This report details the obscene and deadly dimensions of global spending on nuclear weapons in 2022. The headline figures are as follows:

USA: $43.7 bn per year, $83,143 per min

China: $11.7 bn per year, $22,219 per min

Russia: $9.6 bn per year, $18,228 per min

UK: $6.8 bn per year, $12,975 per min

France: $5.6 bn per year, $10,603 per min

India: $2.7 bn per year, $5,181 per min

Israel: $1.2 bn per year, $2,226 per min

Pakistan: $1 bn per year, $1,967 per min

DPRK: $589 million, $1,221 per min

As can be seen from these estimates, the total expenditure on nuclear weapons by the US exceeds that of all other states (China, Russia, UK, france, India, Israel, Pakistan and the DRPK) combined. What does this indicate?

It is understood that all nuclear-armed states are in the process of enhancing, renewing or expanding their abilities to unleash megadeath. It is widely recognised that in addition to the amounts spent on nuclear weapons, additional billions of dollars are spent on new ‘conventional’ weapon systems and a process of rapid militarisation. Taken together and understood in the context of shifting global events and power - Ukraine being the starkest example - there are clear indications that an arms-race is underway.

The US is the dominant power within the nuclear-armed NATO alliance. All NATO Member States, with the exception of France, are members of the ‘Nuclear Planning Group’. France considers its nuclear-weapon systems to be wholly ‘independent’. In Britain, the government claims that it controls an ‘independent nuclear deterrent’, but it is clear that in both technological and command-and-control terms, the British system is reliant on the US [see The Spokesman 153: Bairns not Bombs for John Ainslie’s analysis].

Whatever France claims for its nuclear-weapons-system, as a NATO member it shares and helps to shape the nuclear-alliances’ posture which, as recent strategy documents have made clear, is primarily directed against China and Russia. As such, it makes some sense to view the spending of the US, UK and France as one, especially when contrasting totals.

NATO states spent a total of $56,100,000,000 on nuclear weapons in 2022. This is approximately 4.7 times the amount spent by China and approximately 5.8 times the amount spent by Russia. Russia and China are not in a nuclear alliance or any other kind of military alliance but if their nuclear spending is bundled together then NATO spending outstrips it 2.6 times. Does such a comparison justify the amounts spent by China and Russia? Obviously not. Every dollar spent on nuclear weapons is a dollar spent on the potential destruction of humanity. But comparing total NATO spending on nuclear weapons with the amounts spent by those states identified as primary adversaries offers more than a rudimentary statistical comparator. It implies a state of affairs best described by the term ‘overkill’; it contextualises the increased nuclear spending of non-NATO states and it indicates that what is left of the non-proliferation and nuclear arms control regime is under severe strain. This is a deeply worrying situation.

‘Nuclear overkill’ describes a situation where a nuclear-armed state has more than enough nuclear weaponry to completely destroy an ‘adversary’. It is the case that the US and Russia hold such an ‘overkill’ capacity in that they are not only capable of wiping each other off the map but have sufficient capacity to end all life on this planet. Much of this capacity was embedded in their nuclear systems during the last Cold War. Despite these established capacities, the US spent $43.7 bn in 2022 and Russia spent less than a quarter of that. What is all this money being spent on? How much of it is spent to maintain existing nuclear weapons and how much is spent on developing new nuclear weapons and associated systems?

Nuclear weapon abolitionists will not be the only people looking at these figures. Ideas that pass themselves off as ‘nuclear deterrence strategy’ imply that it would be ‘logical’ for those who spend one quarter of the amount that the US spends on nuclear weapons to attempt to close the gap. If parity of spending proves impossible, then spending as much as possible above and beyond the obscene amounts already spent ‘makes sense’. The absence of a stable and fully operational disarmament, non-proliferation and arms control regime makes such a course of action all the more likely.

Of course, it is worth remembering that the scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty were instigated by George Bush Jnr and Donald J Trump, US Presidents. Let us also remember that Joe Biden, US President, has done nothing to revive these or similar treaties.

Non-nuclear armed states, especially those viewed as adversaries by the US, may look at this list of spending and conclude that they, too, should become nuclear powers. Isn’t this the ‘logic’ and implication of such obscene spending and the mythology that nuclear weapons are the “ultimate guarantor of security”.

Where does this end? At worst, ‘overkill’ and the arms race it drives could result in the total destruction of humanity: megadeath and planetary destruction. At best, if this continues, then each of the nuclear states will be left sitting on enormous stockpiles of world-ending devices that will not and can not feed the hungry, house the homeless, cure the sick, educate our children or do anything else of use.

This waste must stop.