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military spending
The US Made the Mistake of Nuclear War Once—Never Again
The anniversary of the A-bombings must serve not only as a reminder of past devastation, but also as a call for a world free from the existential threat of nuclear war. Instead, we are headed in the opposite direction.
Aug 06, 2025
This year marks 80 years since the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing between 110,000 and 210,000 people. Yet, despite the lessons of this dark chapter of history, more countries are investing in expanding their nuclear arsenals as we face the threat of a renewed nuclear arms race.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, a symbol that represents the estimated likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe, is now only 89 seconds to midnight—unacceptably close to disaster. Global military spending approaches $3 trillion, fueling violence across the world. This spending pays for the Russian bombs dropped on Ukraine, the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, and the escalation of militarized violence across the world. Meanwhile, nuclear development and expansion continue in all nine nuclear-armed states alongside growing fears of nuclear war in Ukraine, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, or the Korean Peninsula. We’re adding fuel to the fire.
U.S. President Donald Trump recently called the bombing of Iran’s Fordow nuclear site “essentially the same thing” as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. This comparison is unfounded and disrespectful. Stories from the A-bomb survivors all share a common theme: In one instant, the bombs turned an average summer day into a nearly incomprehensible hellscape. Even the B-29 bomber pilots who turned back to see the inferno they had unleashed looked down in shock at the burning city. The scale and destruction of these attacks are unlike any bombing the world has seen since.
The anniversary of the bombings must serve not only as a reminder of past devastation, but also as a call for a world free from the existential threat of nuclear war. Instead, we are headed in the opposite direction.
To expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the Trump administration has requested an $87 billion budget in FY26 for nuclear weapons alone—up 26% from the nuclear weapons spending in 2025. The budget request will drastically increase spending on nuclear weapons, while cutting spending on nuclear nonproliferation, cleanup, and renewable energy programs. This is a continuation of the bipartisan trend in the U.S. to continue expanding our nuclear arsenal. For 80 years, A-Bomb survivors have been warning that nuclear weapons can never again be used to destroy lives, yet we are closer today than ever before.
The only world safe from nuclear war is one where nuclear weapons no longer exist. That world is possible—if we choose it.
As the only country to ever use nuclear weapons in war, the U.S. has a unique responsibility to lead the world back from the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Rather than increasing an already unprecedented military budget, the U.S. should instead lead the world as a model for investing in healthcare, education, infrastructure, and social welfare. People around the world are calling for a shift from spending on weapons and war to investing in meeting people’s basic needs. The 10% for All campaign envisions moving just one‑tenth of global military spending into human needs.
Diplomatic efforts are also crucial to stopping a nuclear arms race. Washington and Moscow must also come to the table to discuss the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START)—the last nuclear arms control treaty between the two countries which will expire in February 2026. Currently there is little sign of discussion between the U.S. and Russia to find a meaningful proposal to address nuclear proliferation concerns.
To prevent the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from ever happening again, and to realize the full aspirations of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), leaders must actively pursue a world free of nuclear weapons. The only world safe from nuclear war is one where nuclear weapons no longer exist. That world is possible—if we choose it. Join advocates across the U.S. urging Congress to take a meaningful step toward a world safe from nuclear war.
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It’s Up to We the People to Save a Flailing America From Spiritual Death
For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice.
Aug 05, 2025
As a retired U.S. Air Force officer, I firmly believe in civilian control of our military. This country should be a nation of laws—not of special interests, oligarchs, or kings. Before committing our forces to battle, Congress should always declare war in the name of the people. Our military should indeed be a citizen-soldier force, not an isolated caste driven by a warrior ethos. And above all, the United States should be a republic ruled by law and shaped by sound moral values, not a greed-driven empire fueled by militarism.
Yet when I express such views, I feel like I’m clinging to a belief in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. It feels idealistic, naïve, even painful to think that way. Yes, I served this country in uniform for 20 years, and now, in the age of Donald Trump, it has, as far as I can tell, thoroughly lost its way. The unraveling began so long ago—most obviously with the disastrous Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, though in truth this country’s imperial desires predated even the Spanish-American War of 1898, stretching back to the wanton suppression of indigenous peoples as part of its founding and expansion.
A glance at U.S. history reveals major atrocities: the displacement and murder of Native Americans, slavery, and all too many imperial misadventures abroad. I knew of such realities when I joined the military in 1985, near the end of the Cold War. Despite its flaws, I believed then that this country was more committed to freedom than the Soviet Union. We could still claim some moral authority as the leader of what we then referred to as “the free world,” however compromised or imperfect our actions were.
That moral authority, however, is now gone. U.S. leaders fully support and unapologetically serve an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They sell weapons to nearly every regime imaginable, irrespective of human rights violations. They wage war without Congressional approval—the recent 12-day assault on Iran being just the latest example. (The second Trump administration has, in fact, launched almost as many air strikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, in its first five months as the Biden administration did in four years.) Those same leaders have been doing a bang-up job dismantling the America I thought I was serving when I took that oath and put on second lieutenant’s bars four decades ago. That America—assuming it ever existed—may now be gone forever.
FUBAR: A Republic in Ruins
My fellow citizens, America is FUBAR (a term that dates from World War II). We are not faintly who we claim to be. Rather than a functioning republic, we are an ailing, flailing, perhaps even failing empire. We embrace war, glorify warriors, and profit mightily from the global arms trade, no matter the civilian toll, including tens of thousands of dead and wounded children in Gaza, among the latest victims of U.S.-made bombs, bullets, and missiles.
Signs of moral rot are everywhere. Our president, who would like to be known for his budget cuts, nonetheless giddily celebrates a record trillion-dollar war budget. Our secretary of defense gleefully promotes a warrior ethos. Congress almost unanimously supports or acquiesces in the destruction of Gaza. Images from the region resemble bombed-out Stalingrad in 1942 or Berlin in 1945. Meanwhile, for more than two decades now, America’s leaders have claimed to be waging a successful global “war on terror” even as they fuel terror across the globe. What do they think all those U.S. weapons are for—spreading peace?
Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control.
My wife and I cope through dark humor. We see news on cuts to Medicaid, the mentally ill in the streets, and crumbling infrastructure, and quip: “But Bibi [Netanyahu] needs bombs. Or Ukraine does. Or the Pentagon needs more nukes.” That’s why Americans can’t have nice things like healthcare. That’s why all too many of us are unhoused, in debt, out of work, and desperate. In 1967—yes, that’s almost 60 years ago!—Martin Luther King warned of exactly this: America’s approaching spiritual death through militarism (aggravated by extreme materialism and racism). That death is visibly here, now.
Washington is not even faintly committed to “peace through strength,” a vapid slogan touted by the Trump administration, and an unintentional echo of George Orwell’s dystopian “war is peace.” It is committed instead to what passes for dominance through colossal military spending and persistent war. And let’s face it, that warpath may well end in the death of the American experiment.
The Mediocrity of Our Generals
In this era of creeping authoritarianism and mass surveillance, perhaps the U.S. is lucky that its generals are, by and large, so utterly uninspired. Today’s American military isn’t open to the mercurial and meteoric talents of a Napoleon or a Caesar. Not in its upper ranks, at least.
One struggles to name a truly great American general or admiral since World War II. That war produced household names like George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Chester W. Nimitz. In contrast, America’s recent generals—Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell of Desert Storm fame, Tommy Franks in Iraq in 2003, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal of the “fragile” and “reversible” Iraq and Afghan “surges”—have left anything but a legacy of excellence or moral leadership, not to speak of decisive victory. At best, they were narrowly competent; at worst, morally compromised and dangerously deluded.
Mind you, this isn’t a criticism of this country’s rank-and-file troops. The young Americans I served with showed no lack of courage. It wasn’t their fault that the wars they found themselves in were misbegotten and mismanaged. Twenty years have passed since I served alongside those young troops, glowing with pride and purpose in their dedication, their idealism, their commitment to their oath of service. Many paid a high price in limbs, minds, or lives. Too often, they were lions led by donkeys, to borrow a phrase once used to describe the inept and callous British leadership during World War I at bloody battles like the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917).
Today, I fear that America’s lions may, sooner or later, be led into even deeper catastrophe—this time possibly a war with China. Any conflict with China would likely rival, if not surpass, the disasters produced by World War I. The world’s best military, which U.S. presidents have been telling us we have since the 9/11 attacks of September 2001, stands all too close to being committed to just such a war in Asia by donkeys like Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
And for what? The island of Taiwan is often mentioned, but the actual reason would undoubtedly be to preserve imperial hegemony in the service of corporate interests. War, as General Smedley Butler wrote in 1935 after he retired from the military, is indeed a racket, one from which the rich exempt themselves (except when it comes to taking profits from the same).
A disastrous conflict with China, likely ending in a U.S. defeat (or a planetary one), could very well lead to a repeat of some even more extreme version of Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, amplified and intensified by humiliation and resentment. From the ashes of that possible defeat, an American Napoleon or Caesar (or at least a wannabe imitator) could very well emerge to administer the coup de grace to what’s left of our democracy and freedom.
Avoiding a Colossal Act of Folly
War with China isn’t, of course, inevitable, but America’s current posture makes it more likely. Trump’s tariffs, his bombastic rhetoric, and this country’s extensive military exercises in the Pacific contribute to rising tensions, not deescalation and rapprochement.
While this country invests in war and more war, China invests in infrastructure and trade, in the process becoming what the U.S. used to be: the world’s indispensable workhorse. As the 10 BRICS countries, including China, expand and global power becomes more multipolar, this country’s addiction to military dominance may drive it to lash out. With ever more invested in a massive military war hammer, impetuous leaders like Trump and Hegseth may see China as just another nail to be driven down. It would, of course, be a colossal act of folly, though anything but a first in history.
And speaking of folly, the U.S. military as it’s configured today is remarkably similar to the force I joined in 1985. The focus remains on ultra-expensive weapons systems, including the dodgy F-35 jet fighter, the unnecessary B-21 Raider bomber, the escalatory Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, and Trump’s truly fantastical “Golden Dome” missile defense system (a ghostly rehash of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposal, vintage 1983). Other militaries, meanwhile, are improvising, notably in low-cost drone technology (also known as UAS, or uncrewed autonomous systems) as seen in the Russia-Ukraine War, a crucial new arena of war-making where the U.S. has fallen significantly behind China.
Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.
The Pentagon’s “solution” here is to continue the massive funding of Cold War-era weapons systems while posing as open to innovation, as an embarrassing video of Hegseth walking with drones suggests. America’s military is, in short, well-prepared to fight a major conventional war against an obliging enemy like Iraq in 1991, but such a scenario is unlikely to lie in our future.
With respect to drones or UAS, I can hear the wheels of the military-industrial complex grinding away. A decentralized, low-cost, flexible cottage industry will likely be transformed into a centralized, high-cost, inflexible cash cow for the merchants of death. When the Pentagon faces a perceived crisis or shortfall, the answer is always to throw more money at it. Ka-ching!
Indeed, the recent profit margins of major military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) have been astounding. Since 9/11, Boeing’s stock has risen more than 400%. RTX shares are up more than 600%. Lockheed Martin, maker of the faltering F-35, has seen its shares soar by nearly 1,000%. And Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-21 Raider bomber and Sentinel ICBM, two legs of America’s “modernized” nuclear triad, has seen its shares increase by more than 1,400%. Who says that war (even the threat of a global nuclear war) doesn’t pay?
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s war budget, soaring to unprecedented levels, has been virtually immune to DOGE cuts. While Elon Musk and his whiz kids searched for a few billion in savings by gutting education or squelching funding for public media like PBS and NPR, the Pentagon emerged with about $160 billion in new spending authority. As former President Joe Biden once reminded us: Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value. Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.
What Is To Be Done
I’ve written against warriors, warfighters, and U.S. militarism since 2007. And yes, it often feels futile, but silence means surrender to warmongering fools like Hegseth, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and the farrago of grifters, clowns, toadies, con men, and zealots who inhabit the Trump administration and much of Congress as well. The fight against them must go on.
All leaders, military and civilian, must remember their oath: loyalty to the Constitution, not to any man. Illegal orders must be resisted. Congress must impeach and remove a president who acts unlawfully. It must also reassert its distinctly lost authority to declare war. And it must stop taking “legal” bribes from the lobbyists and foot soldiers who flood the halls of Congress, peddling influence with campaign “contributions.”
For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice. Yet even despair is being weaponized. As a retired colonel and friend of mine wrote to me recently: “I don’t even know where to start anymore, Bill. I have no hope for anything ever improving.”
And don’t think of that despair as incidental or accidental. It’s a distinct feature of the present system of government.
Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control. Yet power ultimately resides in the people (if we remember our duties as citizens). Isn’t it high time that we Americans recover our ideals, as well as our guts?
After all, the few can do little without the consent of the many. It’s up to the many (that’s us!) to reclaim and restore America.
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NATO’s Contribution to the Climate Crisis Cannot Be Ignored
The alliance and its member states must be transparent about the scale of their emissions and must make serious commitments to reduce their carbon footprint.
Jul 26, 2025
According to new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute, or CCI, recent increases in Pentagon spending alone will produce an additional 26 megatons of planet-heating gases—on a par with the annual carbon equivalent emissions generated by 68 gas power plants or the entire country of Croatia.
With the Pentagon’s 2026 budget set to surge to $1 trillion (a 17% or $150 billion increase from 2023), its total greenhouse emissions will also increase to a staggering 178 megatons (Mt) of carbon equivalent emissions (CO2e). This will make the U.S. military and its industrial apparatus the 38th largest emitter in the world if it were its own nation. It will also result in an estimated $47 billion in economic damages globally, including impacts on agriculture, human health, and property from extreme weather, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s social cost of carbon calculator.
Yet the Pentagon’s true climate impact will almost certainly be much worse than estimated by the CCI, as the calculation does not include emissions generated from separate supplementary U.S. military funding, such as for arms transfers to Israel and Ukraine in recent years. It also does not include the emissions from armed conflict, which are considerable when it happens.
And the CCI study only covers U.S. military spending. Military spending in European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries is also surging. At the Hague Summit in June, the 32 NATO member states pledged to increase their military and security spending from 2% to 5% of GDP by 2035. As a result, NATO military spending in Europe and Canada could increase from around $500 million today to $1.1 trillion in 2035, when the combined defense budgets of the other 31 allies will essentially equal the Pentagon’s. Every dollar or euro of this military spending in preparation for NATO to fight hypothetical wars with China, Russia, or anyone else has a climate and opportunity cost.
This training and warfighting will have catastrophic climate consequences, including further water scarcity, sea-level rise, and desertification in vulnerable regions.
Meanwhile, U.S. military leaders want to spend more justified largely on threat inflation. During a recent meeting of military industrial leaders in Wiesbaden, Germany, for example, NATO’s recently appointed Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, restated the flawed case for increased military spending. He called on member states to prepare for the possibility that Russia and China could launch wars in Europe and the Pacific simultaneously, with 2027 being a potential, though highly speculative, flashpoint year.
Grynkewich, who is also head of the U.S. European Command, argued that the situation meant that allies have little time to prepare. “We’re going to need every bit of kit and equipment and munitions that we can in order to beat that,” he said.
His remarks were made during a U.S. Army Europe and Africa-hosted LandEuro symposium, designed to encourage military and industry leaders to find ways to significantly increase weapons production, especially in Europe. As always during such events, the two-day program served as an opportunity for companies to showcase various weapons systems at the symposium’s so-called “Warriors Corner.”
Grynkewich also repeated a key argument used by NATO leaders to justify increased military spending: the growing cooperation among adversaries.
“Each of these threats that are out there cannot be viewed, in my estimation, as discrete challenges. We’ve got to think about how all of them are aligning,” he said.
However, evidence of such an orientation among the so-called “Axis of Upheaval” (China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia) is patchy at best and primarily bilateral rather than as a fully-formed four-way alliance. This cooperation is also driven by shared frustrations with the U.S.-led international order and a desire to counter Western dominance. U.S. President Donald Trump’s systematic demolition of that “rules-based international order,” illegal military attacks on Iran, and constant anti-China rhetoric further shape this cooperation and risk it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At the same symposium, U.S. Army Europe and Africa Commander Gen. Christopher Donahue said that the U.S. Army and NATO have launched a new military initiative called the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line,” which aims to enhance NATO’s ground-based military capabilities and promote military-industrial interoperability across the alliance. Donahue also warned that NATO forces could capture Russia's heavily fortified Kaliningrad region “in a timeframe that is unheard of” if necessary. Therein lies another disconnect. On the one hand NATO pleads a poverty of resources, and on the other brags about already having the capability to stop Russia’s “mass and momentum problem" and to attack and take Russian territory.
It should also be remembered that the United States currently operates over 870 overseas military bases and installations—two and a half times more than the rest of the world combined—and that NATO members already collectively account for 55% of global military spending.
The main disconnect at Wiesbaden, however, was the failure to consider the link between military spending and climate emissions. There was no “Green Corner” to remind NATO generals that the climate crisis is an existential threat, meaning it poses a danger to the fundamental existence of humanity and the planet. This blinkered approach comes right from the top.
In March this year, Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, wrote on X: “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” This training and warfighting will have catastrophic climate consequences, including further water scarcity, sea-level rise, and desertification in vulnerable regions. In turn, this will inevitably lead to political instability and further forced migration.
NATO’s contribution to the climate crisis cannot be ignored. The alliance and its member states must be transparent about the scale of their emissions and must make serious commitments to reduce their carbon footprint.
Instead of ramping up tensions with adversaries, the top NATO generals should be calling for political leaders to invest in diplomatic and nonmilitary solutions to today’s political crises. Then, as the authors of the CCI analysis argue, these increases in U.S. military spending could be redirected toward demilitarized climate resilience measures, such as public transit, renewable energy, or green new social housing—a true investment in human security.
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