Tax Day Realities: Nuclear Weapons and Our Dangerous, Misguided Priorities

Each spring our nation funds our national budget on tax day, April 15. Just as the season itself is a time of renewal, this is a time to reflect on our priorities and who we are as a nation. Each of us can identify funding priorities in our collective daily experience and must ask ourselves if these are being addressed. From childcare and education to healthcare, national defense, and even nuclear weapons, we must set our priorities. With finite dollars and a myriad of national and international needs, we must be informed as to how these funds are being allocated.

Promises of affordability, reduced cost of living, and avoidance of costly wars have not coincided with reality.

Our planet continues to warm with progressive climate change, the last decade being the hottest decade in recorded history, causing increasing scarcity of natural resources further promoting conflict around the planet. Coupled with the potential for future global pandemics, this is a time when global cooperation and collaboration is more important than ever.

Unfortunately, we are pursuing policies of increased isolationism, feigning international cooperation with disdain for the international rule of law. We are pursuing wars, interventions and conflicts of choice, while walking away from international treaties, such as New START and the previous Iran nuclear deal, while bullying nations, thus empowering other nations to follow suit as international law and norms are shunned. We have seen 5 of the 9 nuclear-armed nations at war this past year with China increasing rhetorical threats against Taiwan. The twin interconnected existential threats of climate change and nuclear war seem ever closer. Recognizing this threat, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their symbolic Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight this past January, the closest it has been in its 79 year existence. This is a grim reminder of our increased reliance on luck to prevent a nuclear catastrophe, either by intent, miscalculation, or disruptive technology.

These expenditures rob our communities of precious resources that could be redirected to the actual needs of our citizens providing true security in meeting basic human needs and providing opportunity.

The very existence of nuclear weapons threatens all of us, and everything we hold near and dear, every moment of every day. These are weapons that can never be used. With a perverse logic, as if in a trance to the end, we have chosen as a nation to increase our nuclear weapons program expenditures year over year, further proving the fallacy of deterrence as each of our adversaries do likewise so as not to be outdone.

According to the US Nuclear Weapons Community Cost Project, now in its 37th year, this Fiscal Year 2026 finds the US spending over $137 billion dollars on all nuclear weapons programs. That equates to an average of $401.51 for every man, woman, and child based on an average income of $44,673. These costs affect every community across our nation, from New York City, our richest city, spending over $3.95 Billion; to Flint Michigan, our poorest city, spending over $15.565 million; to the Navajo Nation spending over $28.491 Million. An average American family of four will spend $1,606 dollars on nuclear weapons programs this year, and as a nation we are spending $261,092 every minute on weapons that cannot and must not ever be used without threatening all of humanity.

Where does this fit into your priorities as you think about your family and the future you envision? These expenditures rob our communities of precious resources that could be redirected to the actual needs of our citizens providing true security in meeting basic human needs and providing opportunity.

This is a situation that does not have to be, but one that will not change without public support and outcry. There is a growing national grassroots campaign called Back From the Brink bringing communities together to prevent nuclear war. The movement calls for the US to take a leadership role as follows:

• Actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals;
• Renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first;
• Ending the sole, unchecked authority of any US president to launch a nuclear attack;
• Taking US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and
• Cancelling the plan to replace the entire US nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons.

With over 504 national organizations, 78 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 592 municipal and state official, and 68 members of Congress endorsing, support is growing. Each of us can endorse the campaign, join a local hub, and call on our elected officials to add their name to the growing list of local and federal officials who endorse and support this effort.

We all have a role to play in pursuing a future for our children and future generations. That role is unique to us and not necessarily a large role or a small role, it is our role. If our luck holds out, when our children’s children ask, what did you do when the planet was threatened, how will you respond? Working together we can make nuclear weapons a threat of the past.