U.S. nuclear modernization costs projected to hit $946 billion as arms control framework crumbles

The Trump administration is overseeing a nuclear modernization program of historic scale — the Congressional Budget Office now projects $946 billion in spending over the decade from 2025 to 2034, a $260 billion increase from the CBO's 2023 projection. The Department of Defense's 2026 budget request alone is $961 billion, with nuclear weapons accounting for $69.2 billion annually, more than China, Russia, and all other nuclear-armed states combined. This is not driven by the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (a Biden-era document the current administration has not formally adopted) but by the 2023 Congressional Commission on the U.S. Strategic Posture, which called for 'fully and urgently executing' modernization of all three legs of the nuclear triad — new ICBMs, bombers, and submarine-launched warheads — alongside a major expansion of the nuclear production complex.

The costs crowd out investments in diplomacy, development, and nonproliferation at a moment when the State Department and USAID are being hollowed out. Between 2020 and 2024, the U.S. government invested over twice as much in five weapons companies ($771 billion in Pentagon contracts) as in the entire diplomacy and international assistance budget ($356 billion). The current trajectory — nearly $1 trillion over the next decade — means that by 2030, the U.S. could be outspending China and Russia combined on nuclear forces by a factor of three, yet achieving no net gain in security. Arms control experts from the Quincy Institute, Stimson Center, and Cato Institute warn that numerical superiority does not translate into strategic advantage when even a small retaliatory force assures catastrophic harm; the Cold War logic of competitive buildup has been empirically debunked.

The expiration of New START in February 2026 will remove the last bilateral verification framework with the world's two largest nuclear arsenals. In the absence of arms control, the modernization program signals to both Russia and China that the U.S. is pursuing unilateral superiority, incentivizing them to accelerate their own buildups — precisely the self-defeating dynamic that the 1970s-era SALT process was designed to prevent. The strategic outcome will be lower stability, higher risk of miscalculation, and greater difficulty enlisting allies in nonproliferation efforts. A more restrained approach, such as proposing a new bilateral or trilateral framework with modest transparency measures and a cap on deployed warheads, would free up tens of billions of dollars annually for humanitarian assistance, climate adaptation, and conflict prevention — investments that actually reduce the drivers of insecurity.