Table numbers in parentheses are increases or decreases from the FY26 Request FY25 requested levels come from the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation’s Fiscal Year 2026 Defense Budget Request Briefing Book Request Numbers in this analysis only include discretionary requests Numbers may not add due to rounding Total National Defense Discretionary Spending (050) DOD […]
Front and Center: November 23, 2025
TRUMP’S AMBIGUOUS NUCLEAR TESTING REMARKS SPARK CONFUSION, ALARM Last month, President Donald Trump posted on social media that he had ordered the Department of Defense to resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis” to other countries. Since then, he has doubled down on these comments even as his own administration officials have tried to walk them back. […]
“The war in Ukraine demonstrated that nuclear weapons have no military use.”
Senior Policy Director John Erath was interviewed by CNN Portugal about nuclear weapons in the Russian war on Ukraine. The original article is in Portuguese. INTERVIEW || John Erath, policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, does not believe we are on the verge of a new global nuclear arms race. However, […]
Reflections On My Fall Internship: Julia Cooper
By Julia Cooper, Policy Intern, Fall 2025 When I was 13, at a luncheon for DACOR, I heard military leaders saying that having more nuclear weapons makes the United States safer — which didn’t seem quite right to me. This piqued my interest in nuclear weapons, and I had my first taste of the nuclear […]
Boomtown: How Futuristic Weapons Could Power Albuquerque
Executive Director John Tierney spoke with Undark about directed energy research. Academic researchers like Schamiloglu, though, are working on solving those problems. And according to Harrison and Richardson, the need for that kind of basic research is keeping directed energy funding stable. That’s not true of funding for other fields of science. “You look to where […]
