$91 Billion Wasted on Nuclear Weapons Last Year Could Transform Ecosystem Restoration (Commentary)

The colossal sums spent each year on nuclear weapons should instead be devoted to preserving our planet, says a new report from my organization, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). We should take the money wasted every year on bombs and missiles and, instead of putting ourselves at risk of causing more, perhaps irreparable, damage, repair the damage already done and invest in restoring ecosystems and stopping loss of biodiversity.

Nuclear weapons have already caused extensive damage to our environment and are the only devices ever created capable of destroying all complex life forms on Earth. A nuclear war would lead to climate change with devastating consequences. The world would be plunged into a nuclear winter, subjected to deadly global famine and the exacerbated effects of global warming.

But contrary to what some would have you believe, their devastating impacts are not limited to a hypothetical post-apocalyptic hell, many of them are already being felt today.

Throughout their life cycle, nuclear weapons have left a devastating environmental legacy around the world: from uranium mining to fuel production in nuclear processing plants, including the impacts of thousands nuclear tests over the decades. Nuclear weapons facilities have contaminated soil and water with radioactive waste that can last for thousands of years. Efforts to clean up the sites have been haphazard or half-hearted, cost billions of dollars over several decades – and are still largely unfinished.

For a terrible and terrifying example of the poor restoration efforts, we must mention Runit Dome in the Marshall Islands. After detonating 43 nuclear bombs on Enewetak Atoll between 1948 and 1958 and evicting the people who lived there from their homes, the U.S. government did not begin a cleanup until the 1970s. This consisted – as the Los Angeles Timetable put it in a scathing expose – “burying 33 Olympic swimming pools' worth of irradiated soil and two Olympic swimming pools' worth of contaminated debris from the atoll's islands” and throwing it into the crater they created with the detonation, thus blocking it with a concrete dome.

The dome is showing signs of structural weakness and could crack under the pressure of rising sea levels. The U.S. government now maintains that the crater was built to store debris, not to protect the rest of the environment near its contents.

Of course, the United States is not alone in its failure to manage the environmental effects of its nuclear weapons production, testing, and use. The same can be said of the British in Australia and Kiribati, the French in Algeria and the Pacific, and the USSR/Russia in Kazakhstan.

It is also important to remember that radiation cannot be contained geographically; it respects no national boundaries. Fallout patterns are complex, and the full consequences of fallout from years of particular atmospheric nuclear testing are not known, either on humans or other animals. Recent scientific studies have shown that the high radiation levels in wild boars in Ukraine are likely not directly due to the Chernobyl disaster, but rather the result of nuclear weapons testing conducted prior to the disaster, which left residual radiation in the surrounding areas for decades.

But their destructive capacity does not stop there. Nuclear weapons also have a considerable opportunity cost that prevents us from responding to some of the urgent crises facing our planet.

Every year, the nine nuclear-weapon states divert enormous sums of taxpayer money to produce, maintain and modernize weapons of mass destruction. ICAN publishes the only report that tracks global nuclear weapons spending on an annual basis. Our latest edition found that these states wasted $91.4 billion on their arsenals in 2023.

Imagine what that money could have been used for. A year of spending on nuclear weapons could have funded wind power for over 12 million homes to fight climate change, planted a million trees a minute, or cleaned up the South Pacific Garbage Patch for 187 consecutive years.

It could also cover the entire annual funding gap ($79 billion) for global efforts to restore ecosystems and halt biodiversity loss. As biodiversity loss continues at an unprecedented rate driven by environmental degradation and climate change, new research shows that conservation efforts to improve or slow biodiversity declines are failing two-thirds of the time. Imagine what could be achieved if these efforts were fully funded.

Anyone concerned about the climate crisis, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss should also support the cause of nuclear disarmament with the same passion, because these are interrelated issues.

In the event of nuclear war, all species will be affected. Only one species can stop it.

Melissa Parke is executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. She has worked for the United Nations in Gaza, Kosovo, New York and Lebanon and has served as Australia's Minister for International Development.

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