As the old adage goes: follow the money.
After over a year and a half of a global pandemic, one might think governments would adjust their spending priorities to shift resources to respond to the coronavirus. Not so fast. One area where government spending actually increased globally in 2020: nuclear weapons. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) released a report last month,
Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending, that highlights the money that flowed from the government to corporations to lobbyists and back again. This cycle of funding helps to maintain and develop nuclear weapons.
On the latest episode of Press the Button, Alicia Sanders-Zakre, the Policy and Research Coordinator at ICAN and one of the authors of this report, shares that we are talking about “billions and millions, it s just a massive, massive amount of money.” The report finds that between the nine nuclear weapons states, a total of $72.6 bil