The world is in a new nuclear arms race. Depending on where you live in the United States, you may not even realize it. After decades of decommissioning world-ending nuclear weapons, America, Russia, and China are all building new ones. Russia is testing new nuclear-powered cruise missiles. China is building silos in its deserts from which to launch nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. And the U.S. is set to spend almost $2 trillion on new nuclear weapons
Project 2025 and its authors want America to do more. They want to put America’s “nuclear enterprise on a wartime footing.” That means more nukes, different kinds of nukes, and more trillions spent whose only purpose is the total annihilation of all life on the planet.
Joseph Cirincione has seen it all before, and he’s worried. “Project 2025 is unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” he tells me. Cirincione is a longtime nuclear weapons expert. Early in his career, he was a staffer for Congress where, among other things, he investigated missile systems and nuclear weapons, and advocated for military reform. He’s the former director of non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the retired president of the Ploughshares Fund.
He tells me that on his desk he’s got a copy of the writings of a group called the Committee on the Present Danger. “This is the last time we had an organized conservative group calling for a nuclear arms buildup. I was there for this. I read all these things…they had explicit rationales and strategies and doctrines and plans for what we needed and charts and why we needed 2,000 ICBMS.”
“Well, Project 2025 does that plus they have a plan to actually implement it and they are not fucking around.”
The new nuclear bible
Project 2025 has a lot to say about nuclear weapons.
Though Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025 during and after the campaign, he’s also tapped its authors for key positions in his incoming government. The Heritage Foundation has released several updates about nukes since its initial publication. In March, it released a detailed plan for how to implement its policy goals. On December 10, it released a report arguing that the president needed to put America’s nuclear weapons facilities on a wartime footing.
So what’s the plan?
Big picture, Project 2025 calls on Trump to deploy new kinds of nukes, ramp up production of plutonium pits to use in nukes, chart a course for testing nuclear weapons again, and cut funding from Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia labs’ non-nuclear projects to pay for more nuclear weapons projects.
The U.S. and Russia have gotten rid of a lot of nuclear weapons in the past few decades. In 1987, there were 70,000 total nukes in the world. We pulled back from the brink and now the number is around 12,000. It took years of treaty negotiations and hard political work to make that happen.
The trend is reversing.
It’s not just that America dismantled missiles, it also discontinued whole types of weapons and disentangled nukes from its conventional forces. Republican and Democrat presidents have both removed nukes from America’s arsenal. The U.S. used to field artillery units in Europe capable of launching a nuke, for example. It withdrew them in 1991.
Biden, like many previous administrations, shelved a few nuclear weapons projects. Project 2025 wants to “reverse the Biden Administration’s decision to retire the B83 bomb (in order to maintain two aircraft-delivered warheads) and its decision to cancel the submarine-launched cruise missile (SLCM),” it said.
The B83 is a particularly dangerous weapon to bring back. The gravity bomb is 80 times more powerful than the weapon America dropped on Hiroshima. A simulation showed that, were the U.S. to drop one on an Iranian weapons facility, it would kill three million people and irradiate India. That’s just one bomb. Worse, after the Biden administration announced it was sunsetting the bomb, the Pentagon said it would build a replacement.
The U.S. doesn’t need the B83. It’s overkill. Literally. But Project 2025 wants to keep it around. It also wants to make sure America is allowed to test its nuclear weapons again. It wants to “reject ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and indicate a willingness to conduct nuclear tests in response to adversary nuclear developments if necessary,” it says. “This will require that [National Nuclear Security Administration] be directed to move to immediate test readiness to give the Administration maximum flexibility in responding to adversary actions.”
America tested its last nuke in 1992. Four years later, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The treaty bans nuclear weapons tests and nuclear explosions for any reason, civilian or military. Russia signed and ratified the treaty. President Clinton signed it, but couldn’t get the Senate to ratify it.
“I have been hearing for the last 10 years, the kind of drum beat of ‘We should return to nuclear testing.’” Sharon Squassoni, a nuclear proliferation expert who has advised the U.S. government on nuclear arms control and is now a research professor at George Washington University, tells Gizmodo.
According to Squassoni, lots of American politicians have wanted to bring back nuclear testing. She says it comes from a knee-jerk feeling of not wanting to be restricted. They also worry about nukes. What if nuclear weapons go bad? What if America can’t make nukes like they used to? “For the most part, these are not scientists who are saying that,” she says.
America tested nukes for decades, more than any other country. Its computer models for nuclear weapons are excellent. It doesn’t need to test more. “I think it would be a huge political mistake for the U.S. to resume testing for several reasons. One, we’ve tested more than anybody else. I don’t think the technical gains that you achieve by additional nuclear tests are worth blowing [the CTBT] out of the water.”
Russia already walked away from the treaty. In November 2023, Putin signed a law that pulled the country out of the CTBT. He said he’d done it because the U.S. hadn’t ratified it and, with one of the biggest nuclear powers on the planet avoiding the treaty, he saw no reason to stay in it.
“If we resume testing, so do the Russians, and the Chinese, and the North Koreans. Everybody feels free. Follow the leader,” Squassoni says. “Those folks who think that U.S. actions don’t affect what our competitors or adversaries or wannabes do are sadly mistaken. If the U.S. breaks ranks and decides to resume testing, we will see a lot of nuclear weapons tests and a multifaceted nuclear arms race.”
And Project 2025 absolutely points to an era of resumed nuclear testing. “Project 2025 calls for getting ready to test a nuclear weapon within six months,” Cirincione says. “It would take years for the U.S. to renew the test site that we have in Nevada. They want to test nuclear weapons. They don’t say ‘we’re going to do it’ they say, ‘we have to get ready to do it if the situation calls for it.”
If that happens, says Cirincione, “we’re back. We’re back in the dark days of the nuclear era, except our leaders are more unstable across the board.”
Follow the leader
Trump’s pick to head the Department of Energy is energy executive Chris Wright. The DOE’s principal concern is nuclear weapons, but you wouldn’t know that based on the coverage of Wright. A New York Times profile of Wright from December 12 doesn’t mention nuclear weapons once. It’s mostly about how he thinks fracking, oil, and gas are virtuous.
“I don’t know much about him. He’s the latest nominee that will discover that the business of the Department of Energy is nuclear weapons,” Cirincione says, referencing Trump’s last head of DOE, Rick Perry. When Perry took the job, he famously had no idea that the DOE was in charge of nukes.
“He may think it’s about oil and gas, but most of its budget goes to nukes and I don’t think he knows anything about that. So what does that mean? That means he will basically be a rubber stamp for the Project 2025 Agenda,” Cirincione says.
Squassoni didn’t know Wright either. “The question is who’s going to run NNSA. Don’t get me wrong, the Secretary of Energy is a cabinet-level position and will go to bat for more nuclear weapons,” she says. “But the person at NNSA has a lot of clout and has an entire bureaucracy to run that supports nuclear weapons.”
We don’t know yet who will head the NNSA under Wright and Trump, but Cirincione says the Project 2025 material he’s revealed shows how the conservatives expect the new administration to work.
“They want the President to make a speech on the importance of nuclear weapons. They want the Director of the National Nuclear Security Agency, which is under the Department of Energy, to meet with the president monthly and give him a report on weapons production. They have specific goals for the production of new plutonium cores,” he says.
It’s all about the money
Cirincione has lived through all this before. He’s seen the nuclear buildups, the calls to arms, and the destruction of arms control treaties before. He says that this time it’s different. “Unlike the 1980s or the 1960s, this nuclear arms race is being driven by contracts, not ideology,” he says.
The people who advised Republican presidents during the Cold War believed the U.S. needed to build weapons of mass destruction to counter a growing Soviet threat. “That’s what they believed,” he says. “That’s what drove the build-up. That’s not what’s happening now. The strategic discussion is there, like Project 2025, but it’s a thin veneer that covers a mountain of contracts. It is the justification for the contracts, not the driver of any of the programs. And this is being done basically for money.”
The new nuclear arms race is big business. “These are people who understand that there is a trough of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending, and they want a piece of it, and that’s what they’re going after,” he says. The U.S. is already set to spend trillions of dollars modernizing its nuclear arsenal.
The Sentinel system alone, a program that will see new nuclear weapons silos constructed across the U.S, will require more than a trillion dollars to accomplish. Contractors will construct temporary housing for workers, contractors will deploy enormous earth movers to dig out huge caverns for the silos, contractors will pour concrete and serve meals and buy tools. A new nuclear arms race will make a few people very rich.
But, when it comes to nukes, there are always costs other than money. Even the detonation of one modern nuke could have vast and horrifying consequences for the environment. A 2022 study found that a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would kill 5 billion people, most of it from starvation following devastating changes to global food production. New nuclear tests would generate new nuclear waste. Nuclear material from the Manhattan Project is still killing people in 2024. Project 2025 calls on the incoming administration to deal with this problem, but it’s light on details.
“The defense industry has over 770 lobbyists In Washington lobbying for defense contracts. They shower the committees in political contributions. They place their people in senior positions and they hire people from senior positions in the famous Washington revolving door,” Cirincione explains. “They fund think tanks across Washington to mute any criticism and to publish expert analysis in favor of a nuclear buildup.”
He says that the defense contractors learned from Big Oil and how it handled climate change. “You just start funding your own studies that downplay the climate crisis. If you have people who are warning about nuclear risk, well you fund a whole bunch of studies that downplay the nuclear risks or twist it so that the answer to the nuclear threats is to build more weapons, and it works.”
The reality of nuclear weapons is that the U.S. president has sole authority to use them. The system was designed so that one person could make the decision to use weapons that could end the world. On January 20, the person is going to be Donald Trump. Again.
“The pages of Project 2025 constitute a recipe for a nuclear arms race,” Squassoni says.
China and Russia are both building up their nuclear stockpiles. New START, the last remaining nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia, will expire in 2026 unless it’s renewed. It’s an Obama-era policy, one Trump isn’t likely to pursue. Putin also isn’t interested.
We’re in the middle of a crisis, one that calls for cool heads and diplomacy. The world isn’t safer with more nuclear weapons in it. “If you view the security environment through the lens of Project 2025, arms control has been shrunk down to this tiny little roll, which is ‘We’ll only do things that don’t affect our efforts to bolster deterrence,” Squassoni says. “It’s very much: ‘We’re going to get out of this security dilemma by just building up.’”
