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Campaign's Augmented Reality Tool Allows Students to Explore True Cost of Nuclear Weapons
"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. It puts the cost of these decisions in the room where your kids learn, at the scale where you can actually feel it."
Apr 21, 2026
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."
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Golden Dome as a Leaky Golden Shower: Trump's $4 Trillion Missile Defense System Ridiculed in DC
"This is not defense, it's deception—an illusion of safety. The Pentagon has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last several decades proving that this freaking thing doesn't work."
Apr 02, 2026
Critics of the 'Golden Dome' missile defense shield program championed by US President Donald Trump gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC on Wednesday to ridicule and condemn the wasteful military program, which experts warn will never work as promised but will plow billions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the weapons industry.
Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and found of the anti-war group Up In Arms, led the event which included the unveiling of an art installation—complete with a statue of Trump holding a golden umbrella filled with holes, urinating missiles, and running water—to represent the "unworkable space shield" known as the Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense shield that varying studies estimate could cost from $540 billion to a mind-blowing $6 trillion over 20 years to operate.
With the DC event taking place on April 1, Cohen told those gathered that the problem with the Golden Dome is that "it's not a prank," but rather a real program that Trump is trying pursue despite its deep and obvious flaws.
"Sure, you know, an invisible shield that protects you from any possible threat, is a nice idea," said Cohen, "but it's full of holes."
"This is not defense, it's deception—an illusion of safety," Cohen continued. "The Pentagon has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last several decades proving that this freaking thing doesn't work, but it's just such an attractive fantasy that it's being pulled out of the trash bins of history to soak the taxpayer once again."
"It's another one of the harebrained ideas that pops out of our president's head every now and then, but the Hole-in-Dome [statue] demonstrates that he's all wet on this one," said Cohen. "The other thing the Hole-in-Dome demonstrates is that our country is under water—we are drowning in debt. And wasting another $4 trillion on a holey dome ain't gonna help, especially when we need that money for Social Security, affordable housing, and healthcare."
The overall message, he said, was that "if we don't stop this boondoggle, we're sunk."
Dr. Igor Moric, a research physicist at the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security, also spoke at the event, explaining how the Golden Dome system—despite Trump's unfounded claims that it will be able to shield the American people from future ballistic missile attacks—runs up against fundamental scientific limits.
“The United States has been building ballistic missile defense, a magical shield against nuclear weapons for over 80 years,” Moric said. “The reality is ballistic missile defense does not work, it cannot work, and it will not work. Space-based missile defense, as envisioned by the Golden Dome, cannot work because of known physical and technological realities limiting what it can do."
According to the Up In Arms website, "Golden Dome would be an enormously expensive system that would not provide an effective defense. It would instead fuel an arms race that would reduce US and international security, and increase the risk of nuclear war."
Dr. Ira Helfand, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Back from the Brink campaign, noted that even "optimistic scenarios" of success by a Golden Dome system would not prevent catastrophic consequences, warning that even if the system could intercept 80% of incoming weapons, tens of millions of Americans could still be killed in a large-scale nuclear attack.
“This system does not protect the American people,” he says. “The attempt to build this system will fuel the arms race and torpedo efforts to actually get rid of [nuclear] weapons."
Other speakers focused on the need to use precious tax dollars not for unrealistic and unworkable weapons like Golden Dome, but rather to invest in social programs—including education, Social Security, healthcare, and affordable housing—that the nation desperately needs.
“The Golden Dome is not golden for the people of the United States or the world,” said former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, who also spoke at the event.
People in Cleveland and other US cities, Turner said, would “much rather have the money that is being wasted on a pipe dream and a fantasy invested in lifting them and their children out of poverty.”
“There is a connection between this foolishness and folly and the reason we can't have nice things in the United States of America," added Turner. "They tell us they can't afford universal healthcare, but they can afford this!"
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'Up in Arms': Ben & Jerry's Co-Founder Launches New Campaign Against Bloated Pentagon Budget
"If we take half the money budgeted for the Pentagon and invested in the things people need and want," said Ben Cohen, "the American Dream can become a reality again."
Jun 14, 2025
Joined by retired military officers and national security experts, Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen on Thursday launched a campaign targeting the nearly $900 billion Pentagon budget and the $100 billion spent on nuclear weapons and "to get our country to start funding the American Dream instead of the death of millions of people."
Standing near Union Station in Washington, D.C. beside a towering sculpture showing what $100 billion looks like, supporters of the Up in Arms campaign—a planned four-year public education and advocacy project "to bring common sense to the Department of Defense and the country's budgetary bottom line"—chanted, "Money for the poor, not nuclear war!"
"There will be no peace, there will be no security, until we start using our resources to provide for the needs of our people at home and around the world," Cohen said at the event. "And we have the money to do it, at no additional taxpayer expense. If we take half the money budgeted for the Pentagon and invested in the things people need and want, the American Dream can become a reality again."
The peace group Ploughshares, which moderated a press conference for the launch of Up in Arms, said that the faux-$100 billion installation could be the tallest protest structure ever erected in Washington, D.C.
"This is a structure that represents the $100 billion that our country spends each year on nuclear weapons," Cohen said while standing in front of the tower and embracing Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of the peace group CodePink. "Fifty percent of that is for a whole new generation of nuclear weapons."
"Ice cream not bombs!" Benjamin said next. "Ice cream not nuclear weapons!"
The $100 billion figure includes spending on modernizing the nuclear arsenal, supporting its infrastructure, and addressing legacy issues like nuclear waste.
"Congress could make it easier for Americans to buy homes and save on gas or they could tackle the opioid epidemic–but those are clearly NOT their priorities," Up in Arms says on its website. "We have all the money we need to create a good life for all Americans. For half the money we spend on nuclear bombs, we could stop poisoning kids with lead, provide funding for public schools, and make childcare affordable."
Former U.S. military officers-turned-peace defenders Dennis Laich, Lawrence Wilkerson, Ann Wright, Karen Kwiatkowski, William Astore, and Dennis Fritz, as well as FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley and former CIA officer Ray McGovern, are taking part in the Up in Arms campaign.
"We're here today to say we don't want our money spent this way, we want our money spent… on things that keep people alive, not on things that kill people," said Wright, a former U.S. Army colonel and current member of the Eisenhower Media Network and Veterans Against Genocide.
"We're up in arms and down on these damn nuclear weapons," she added, "and We the People have to be able to go to each one of these congresspeople and say, 'We don't care how much money you're getting from all of these companies that make a killing out if killing with these nuclear weapons.'"
Laich, a former U.S. Army general also with the Eisenhower Media Network, noted that the U.S. military budget "is larger than the next 10 countries combined, and what do we get for it?"
"Since World War II, we tied in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, we won the first Gulf War, we lost in Iraq, and we lost in Afghanistan," he said. "They always say we have the greatest military on earth; I don't buy it."
President Donald Trump is proposing a record $1 trillion Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2026 while backing legislation that would dramatically slash spending on vital social programs in order to fund a massive tax break that would overwhelmingly benefit the rich and corporations.
On Friday, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons—which earned the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for spearheading the landmark Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—published an analysis showing the world's nine nuclear powers spent a combined baseline $100 billion on their arsenals last year, an 11% increase from 2023. The United States alone accounted for well over half of that amount.
Cohen is a longtime anti-war activist. Last month, he was arrested after disrupting a Senate hearing, shouting, "Congress kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs and pays for it by kicking kids off Medicaid in the U.S." as he was hauled off by police.
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