US to spend $1 trillion on nuclear arms in 30 years: Report

Nearly seventy years after melting down Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US is planning to spend over $1 trillion on its nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years, a new report says.

“Over the next thirty years, the United States plans to spend approximately $1 trillion maintaining the current arsenal, buying replacement systems, and upgrading existing nuclear bombs and warheads,” said the report by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) released on Tuesday.

The costs will not be distributed evenly across the coming years.

The CNS report adds that “procurement of replacement platforms and associated warheads will peak during a four to six year window, sometime after 2020” during which Washington will devote as much as three percent of its annual military budget to its nuclear arsenal.

The funding is comparable to spending levels used for modernizing US nuclear arsenal under former president Ronald Reagan during the 1980s arms race with the former Soviet Union.

The estimated figures by CNS’s year-long study are consistent with those of Congressional Budget Office which predicted last month that the US would spend $355 billion over the next decade on its nuclear weapons complex.

The US is considered one of the largest possessors of nuclear weapons in the world and the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons against another nation.

Based on recent numbers from Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS), the US currently holds a stockpile of 4,650 nuclear warheads, 2,130 of which are operational. In addition, Washington has 2,700