Following the Money: How the United States Pays for Its Nuclear Weapons

There is not—nor has there ever been—a single line item in the federal budget for nuclear weapons. 

As a result, throughout the Cold War and beyond, government officials, members of Congress, journalists, and the public had no clear idea how many taxpayer dollars were spent annually or cumulatively to build and sustain the nuclear arsenal and cover the cost of the many programs related to its operations. This problem has been particularly acute regarding the Department of Defense budget, where most taxpayer money is spent.

With a new administration in power and the U.S. military undergoing an overhaul of its entire nuclear arsenal—now estimated to cost more than $1.5 trillion—it’s worth examining how these projects are funded, approved, and overseen.

It’s also noteworthy that even though tens of billions of dollars are spent on them every year,  it has been decades since the cost of nuclear weapons—either for individual weapons systems or the enterprise as a whole—was the subject of significant and sustained debate in Congress, either at the committee level or on the House or Senate floor.

Crises (including the repeated and very public nuclear threats Vladimir Putin has issued since the start of his war against Ukraine in February 2022) and severe cost overruns and delays generate headlines and concerns, but only fleetingly. Today, few mainstream journalists cover this beat regularly, and often only if there's a controversy or during an international or domestic crisis. This contributes to a long-standing lack of critical public and congressional attention.

There have been periodic and frequently unsuccessful votes on amendments to trim or eliminate a particular program or to limit a president’s ability to initiate a nuclear war single-handedly. Still, most members of Congress know little about these issues and have not weighed in publicly. The same goes for the public at large. 

How Nuclear Weapons are Paid For

The fiscal year for the federal government runs from October 1 through September 30. The process of preparing the annual budget commences in the spring when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) begins holding meetings to determine priorities for the fiscal year two years ahead. About a month before the start of the next fiscal year, federal departments and agencies submit their budget requests to OMB. Over the next two months, OMB prepares a draft budget for the president’s review, and the president signs off on the overall budget and the budgets for individual federal departments and agencies. Departments and agencies can then appeal the president’s and OMB’s decision if they believe they should receive more money.

In early February (or sometimes later, if a new administration needs more time), the president submits a comprehensive budget request to Congress. The various congressional committees and subcommittees then get to work (each according to their areas of legal jurisdiction), holding hearings and preparing annual legislation for how much money to authorize and to appropriate for the next fiscal year.

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees (and their subcommittees) prepare the annual National Defense Authorization Act for military spending (including nuclear weapons programs managed by the Department of Energy). This act provides the legislative authority to create or continue government programs (and agencies) and recommends maximum spending levels to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees (and their subcommittees). The appropriators, in turn, specify the terms and conditions for using the authorized funds.

These two sets of committees and subcommittees typically spend several months (mid-winter to mid-spring) holding numerous hearings (some open, some classified), where officials responsible for the programs they oversee are invited to testify and make the case for why they need the requested funds. Later in the spring, they begin marking up the draft authorization and appropriations bills (the “chairman’s mark”), going through them section by section so members can discuss and vote to amend language and increase or decrease funding levels as desired, sometimes for policy reasons but often for pork barrel ones.

Typically, this work is carried out first in the subcommittees (for nuclear weapons, these are the Strategic Forces and Seapower subcommittees in the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and the Defense, Energy and Water, and Military Construction subcommittees on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees), before the full committees consider everything in the final, large, bill.

However, in 2024, the Republican-controlled House Armed Services Committee dispensed with subcommittee consideration of the authorization bill and handled everything in the full committee.

Funding to manage and “clean up” radioactive and toxic wastes generated by decades of nuclear weapons production and testing activities at facilities managed by the Department of Energy is authorized by the House Energy and Commerce and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committees and their Energy subcommittees, and appropriated by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees and their Energy and Water Development subcommittees. These programs typically receive even less scrutiny than the military hardware needed to operate and sustain the nuclear arsenal.

How budgeting works and doesn’t

In an ideal world, all these committees and subcommittees complete their work and bring their respective authorization and appropriations bills to the House and Senate floors for debate, amendments, and final votes before Congress recesses in August. When that happens, the House and Senate Armed Services and Appropriations committees appoint two separate conference committees composed of a subset of their members to work out or reconcile the inevitable differences in their respective bills and prepare a final, identical compromise bill for each chamber to approve before the start of the fiscal year on October 1.

Anticipating this process, the chairs of all the committees sometimes put language and funding into their bills specifically to create negotiating leverage vis-à-vis their counterparts in the other chamber and achieve their desired political outcomes in the final bill. Once the final bills are approved, the president signs them into law, and the departments will have the necessary guidance and funding to continue their work for the next fiscal year.

However, in recent years, due to deep partisan and policy disputes in Congress (and especially in the House of Representatives), there have been times when members failed to vote on some of the essential appropriations bills, forcing both chambers to pass one or more continuing resolutions to keep the federal government funded for weeks or months while lawmakers try to resolve their profound differences. These resolutions merely extend the guidance and funding set for the prior fiscal year, sometimes for months into the new fiscal year, making it difficult for departments and agencies to efficiently manage the programs under their purview and contributing to scheduling delays and cost overruns.

Significantly few programs get curtailed or closed down by Congress. In fact, in the nearly 80 years that nuclear weapons have existed, Congress has only canceled two nuclear weapons programs: the expensive, very limited, and ineffective Safeguard anti-ballistic missile system (in 1975) and the controversial Reliable Replacement Warhead (in 2008).

The book Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, published in 1998, was the first comprehensive estimate based on government budgetary data to be assembled and published. Its findings were stunning. Adjusted for inflation, those cumulative costs (which are still growing) now conservatively exceed $12 trillion, or about a third of the entire U.S. national debt.

Today, core annual costs for nuclear weapons total $53 billion, with the Department of Defense accounting for over $35 billion and the Department of Energy accounting for over $18 billion. Unless Congress or the Executive Branch chooses or is forced to change course, these costs will increase dramatically in the years ahead as work accelerates on upgrading every aspect of the nuclear arsenal and its aging supporting infrastructure (the estimated total cost over about 30 years is approaching $2 trillion and could easily increase).

Furthermore, if the unavoidable lifecycle costs to manage and clean up massive amounts of toxic and radioactive wastes left over from decades of manufacturing tens of thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads, as well as the current costs of our ballistic missile defense systems, counterterrorism and nonproliferation programs, essential intelligence-related activities, and other nuclear weapons-related programs are added in, the total current cost to sustain U.S. nuclear weapons would increase by at least $25 billion to nearly $80 billion a year.

Learning from the past?

During the Cold War, pervasive secrecy, fear of the Soviet Union, patriotism, and trust in the government ensured little sustained or critical congressional, media or public attention focused on the enormous sums of taxpayer money being expended to build and operate a massive, globe-spanning nuclear arsenal. For all those reasons and more, the size and cost of the U.S. nuclear arsenal exceeded all logical boundaries, a fact even some U.S. generals and admirals who spent careers working with and supporting it eventually belatedly acknowledged.

The U.S. is more than a decade and $100 billion into an anticipated 30-year upgrade of the entire nuclear arsenal and supporting infrastructure. Today, the country has a better understanding of these programs' present and estimated future costs than in the past. This provides a critical opportunity—before multiple new weapons systems begin rolling off assembly lines—to urge our elected leaders to make thoughtful decisions about the best way forward, informed not only by the state of the world but rapidly escalating expenses and the costly historical record.