DOVES who once cheered President Obama for his antinuclear crusades and later fell silent as he backpedaled are now lining up to denounce him. A recent skewering by the Federation of American Scientists details how Mr. Obama, despite calling repeatedly for “a world without nuclear weapons,” has reduced the size of the nation’s atomic stockpile far less than did any of his three immediate predecessors, including both Presidents Bush.

Critics are calling out the president not only for modest cuts but also for spending more than previous administrations to modernize the remaining arms and for authorizing a new generation of weapon carriers. They call the upgrades an enormous waste of money, citing estimates that put the nation’s costs over the next three decades at up to a trillion dollars.

Mr. Obama should “suspend plans to develop a new arsenal,” Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a private group in San Francisco, wrote recently in an op-ed article in The Los Angeles Times. He argued that the move would save money and advance global security. “Unless something is done soon,” he wrote, “we will buy thousands of new hydrogen bombs and mount them on hundreds of new missiles and planes.”

The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, a Washington-based network of organizations, recently condemned the administration’s plans as “the largest expansion of funding on nuclear weapons since the fall of the Soviet Union.”