By Noah C. Mayhew | July 8, 2021

The international community is increasingly prioritizing the voices of young experts in nuclear nonproliferation and related issues. This generation—my generation—is facing the simultaneous pressure to pursue higher education to be successful and, at least in the United States, the burden of taking on gargantuan amounts of student debt. As someone who has invested more than $100,000 in educating myself about topics as salient as nuclear nonproliferation, US-Russian arms control, and international diplomacy, I find it absolutely incomprehensible why the United States puts the kind of money it does into military spending ($778 billion in 2020)—and more specifically into the obscene budget for the nuclear modernization project, which will cost taxpayers an estimated $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion over 30 years.

These figures lead me, and I suspect many other young American nuclear policy experts, to question why my government is spending this level of money to modernize a leg of the US nuclear triad—namely intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—that not only is outrageously expensive but also inherently destabilizing and unnecessary for deterrence.