World nuclear weapons spending hits record $119 billion in 2025

The world’s nine nuclear-armed states spent a record $119 billion on nuclear weapons in 2025, a jump of nearly 19% from the year before. The United States accounted for about $69.2 billion of that total, more than all the other nuclear powers combined, putting American spending at the center of a new and costly nuclear buildup.

The money is not just keeping existing arsenals afloat. ICAN said the increase reflected a broader push to modernize and expand nuclear forces, with countries moving warheads from storage to delivery systems and committing to long-term upgrade programs. That means new missiles, bombers, submarines, warheads and supporting infrastructure, all of which deepen the strategic value of nuclear weapons inside defense planning while also raising the risk of escalation in a crisis.

China spent about $13.5 billion in 2025, while Britain moved ahead of Russia as the third-largest spender at roughly $12.6 billion. The 2025 total was the highest annual figure ICAN has tracked, surpassing the group’s 2024 estimate of $100.2 billion, which was itself 11% higher than 2023. In other words, the spending curve has not just stayed high, it has climbed sharply for consecutive years.

The broader arms picture helps explain why. SIPRI said that at the start of 2025 the nine nuclear-armed states together possessed about 12,241 nuclear weapons, including 9,614 that were considered potentially operationally available. About 3,912 warheads were deployed with operational forces and around 2,100 were kept on high operational alert. SIPRI also said the United States and Russia together hold almost 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads, while China’s arsenal rose from about 500 to up to 600 warheads during 2024.

For the United States, the spending question is especially stark. A January 2026 Congressional Research Service primer said the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2025 that U.S. programs to operate and modernize nuclear forces would cost $946 billion over the next 10 years, and that the Pentagon’s fiscal 2026 budget request included about $60 billion across the nuclear enterprise. That scale of commitment suggests a long-term doctrine built around renewal, not restraint, even as policymakers elsewhere demand fiscal discipline.

ICAN marked 2025 as 80 years since the first detonation and use of nuclear weapons, and said the rise in spending showed geopolitical tensions hardening into open arms competition. The group’s methodology draws on publicly available defense data and operating costs for warheads and delivery systems, but it also underscores a persistent transparency gap, including limited public information on some host-nation costs for U.S. deployments in NATO Europe. The result is a record bill for weapons whose strategic value is unquestioned by their owners, but whose price and purpose remain far less openly debated by the public that pays for them.