The Skyrocketing Costs of U.S. Nuclear Weapons and its Implications

The Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction hosted the webinar “The FY27 U.S. Nuclear Weapons Budget: NNSA and DoD Priorities.” Eliana Johns of the Federation of American Scientists and Xiaodon Liang of the Arms Control Association provided a briefing on the $1.45 trillion FY27 defense budget request and examined its implications for U.S. nuclear weapons programs and strategy.

The panelists discussed the $27 billion NNSA Weapons Activities request and the $71 billion in total nuclear weapons spending requested by the Department of Defense, including funding for key nuclear modernization programs. The webinar reviewed funding priorities across major nuclear weapon systems and modernization programs, highlighted emerging trends in U.S. nuclear spending, and considered what the proposed investments could mean for the future of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and U.S. nuclear strategy.

Speakers:

_ Xiaodon Liang is Senior Policy Analyst for Nuclear Weapons Policy and Disarmament at the Arms Control Association. He focuses on U.S. nuclear weapons policy and the nuclear weapons budget, arms control and disarmament policy, and U.S. strategic relations with Russia and China.

_ Eliana Johns is a research advisor with the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, and a contributor to the Nuclear Notebooks produced for the Bulletin of Atomic scientists since 2022. Her research uses open-source methods to examine nuclear forces and nuclear weapons policy, as well as the intersection of emerging technology and security, with a particular focus on East Asia.

_ Curtis Asplund (moderator) is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at San José State University, California, and a member of the Physicists Coalition’s Steering Committee.