At a press briefing at the United Nations in New York today, nuclear policy experts and NGO leaders marked the start of UN Disarmament Week by launching the “Count the Nuclear Weapons Money” campaign. It’s an initiative organized by an international coalition of NGOs to constrain nuclear arsenals by cutting off the budgets and investments that fund them, and redirecting the money toward impact investing for climate protection and sustainable development.

The coalition argues that nuclear weapons industry is using its leverage to promote a dangerous nuclear arms race with a mammoth price tag, undermining climate protection and sustainable development, and aggravating the risk of a catastrophic nuclear war. So the campaign takes an unusual and promising approach to arms control by bringing new scrutiny to the financing of nuclear weapons and the lobbying power of defense contractors, and by building new cooperation between disarmament, climate action and sustainable development advocates.

“The nuclear weapons industry is powerful and wealthy, and has a stranglehold on the political process in most of the nuclear armed states,” said Alyn Ware (New Zealand), Member of the World Future Council and Global Coordinator of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament. “But we can take back this power by supporting legislative efforts to cut nuclear weapons budgets, and by ending investments from our cities, universities, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and banks in the nuclear weapons industry.”

Starting today, campaign participants are publicly counting out a trillion dollars (in fake bills) to dramatize the vast amount of money nuclear weapons states are spending on maintaining, modernizing and expanding nuclear arsenals over the next ten years. That trillion dollars could be spent instead to reduce geopolitical tensions driving increased reliance on nuclear weapons. For example it could fund the entire UN budget for one hundred years, and/or go a long way toward achieving climate and sustainable development goals. “We need to invest billions to stop climate change,” said Holger Guessefeld (Germany) of the World Future Council, who conceived the money counting actions. “This money would be available if we stopped wasting money on nuclear weapons” . . .