Campaign's Augmented Reality Tool Allows Students to Explore True Cost of Nuclear Weapons

A new educational campaign is using augmented reality technology to help American students understand the true costs of possessing and maintaining a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Up in Arms, a campaign started by Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen to increase support for slashing the bloated US defense spending budget, has teamed with nonprofit media lab Amplifier to create Class Dismissed, a new initiative that gives students in K-12 classrooms a jarring visual representation of nuclear weapons.

"This is a campaign about tradeoffs," Classed Dismissed states on its website. "By placing full-scale representations of nuclear weapons into classrooms, gyms, libraries, and schoolyards, the project makes national spending priorities visible at human scale. As federal military budgets expand, domestic programs are squeezed year after year. While hundreds of billions flow into Cold War–era weapons, schools are left with overcrowded classrooms, aging buildings, and fewer teachers and support staff."

The campaign emphasizes that the weapons students will see depicted on their devices through augmented reality are "not hypothetical," but instead reflect "real weapons programs and real costs, translated through comparisons drawn from public reporting and nonpartisan budget analysis."

Aaron Huey, founder of Amplifier and creative director for Class Dismissed, said the campaign decided to use augmented reality technology to accomplish "things that are physically impossible but politically necessary."

"We can't put a nuclear warhead on a teacher's desk in real life, but with AR we can make you see it there," said Huey. "It puts the cost of these decisions in the room where your kids learn, at the scale where you can actually feel it."

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 2025 projected that plans by the US Department of Defense and Department of Energy to "operate, sustain, and modernize current nuclear forces and purchase new forces" will cost $946 billion through 2034, an average of $95 billion per year.

"That total includes $357 billion to operate and sustain current and future nuclear forces and other supporting activities," CBO explained. "$309 billion to modernize strategic and tactical nuclear delivery systems and the weapons they carry; $72 billion to modernize facilities and equipment for the nuclear weapons laboratory complex; $79 billion to modernize command, control, communications, and early-warning systems; and $129 billion to cover potential additional costs in excess of projected budgeted amounts estimated using historical cost growth."