“I have watched your presidents come and go for 60 years,” a survivor of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki told me recently. “Democrats, Republicans — the weapons remain.”
His observation echoes what President Dwight Eisenhower, a former general, warned in his 1961 farewell address, when he cautioned against the influence of what he termed “the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower saw firsthand how weapons industries develop their own political constituencies, lobbying power and self-perpetuating logic independent of actual national security needs.
The numbers bear this out. This year, the United States plans to spend $87 billion on nuclear weapons — a 26% increase over the previous administration’s last budget request. Much of that flows to private defense companies whose contractors made campaign contributions to 92 of 100 senators and 413 of 435 House members in 2024 alone.
The review conference of the parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which is nearing its conclusion this week at the United Nations, has confirmed the bleakest expectations. The nuclear weapons states — the U.S., Russia, France, the United Kingdom and China — have spent the sessions blaming others while their arsenals continue to grow. Non-nuclear states, their frustration no longer disguised, are asking aloud why they remain bound by a treaty whose disarmament provisions the nuclear states have never honored.
The conference will almost certainly close without meaningful agreement — the latest evidence that the diplomatic track has reached its ceiling.
Treaties depend on the will of governments. But when corporate interests push governments in the opposite direction, they face a structural ceiling. If we are serious about reducing nuclear risk, it is time for a different approach: Target the companies that profit.
Already, the sovereign wealth funds of Norway and New Zealand as well as ABP — the Dutch civil servants’ fund and one of the world’s largest pension funds — prohibit investment in companies that manufacture nuclear weapons. Across the United States, cities including New York, Philadelphia, Madison, Wisconsin, and Berkeley, California, have moved to exclude these companies from municipal investments and contracts.
Here is evidence that this approach is working: In December, the European Union quietly reclassified nuclear weapons as acceptable investments under its sustainable finance framework — reversing environmental, social and governance guidelines that had previously prohibited such investments, just as they prohibit investment in cluster munitions, land mines and chemical weapons. The nuclear industry lobbied hard for that reclassification. Industries that feel no financial pressure do not lobby regulators to change investment guidelines.
To understand the mechanism, consider what happened to Textron of Providence, Rhode Island — the last American manufacturer of cluster munitions. In 2016, it shut down that production line. A Barclays analyst stated that cluster munitions had limited the “ownability” of Textron shares among European institutional investors. For many defense companies, nuclear weapons are a profitable but relatively small part of a larger portfolio of businesses, ranging from thermostats to jet engines. When institutional investors exclude their stock and lenders decline to extend credit, the cost of financing rises across the entire portfolio. Lobbying for nuclear weapons contracts becomes less profitable. The calculus shifts.
The scale of untapped American institutional capital makes this lever significant. U.S. state and local public pension funds hold approximately $5.5 trillion in assets. University endowments across the country amount to a further $874 billion — a pool that is actively divesting from fossil fuels but has adopted no equivalent policy on nuclear weapons manufacturers. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, better known as CalPERS, and other major state pension funds have previously divested from tobacco, thermal coal and firearms manufacturers, establishing that weapons-adjacent exclusions are within their fiduciary authority. Applying that authority to nuclear weapons manufacturers is a decision, not a legal barrier.
There is a deeper reason why a financial strategy matters here. Nuclear policy is made at the Pentagon, the Department of Energy and international treaty conferences — in bureaucracies far removed from the local and state officials most accessible to ordinary voters. Citizens have little direct democratic leverage over these decisions. In a policy domain this distant from the ballot box, exercising the power of the purse can be the more effective lever.
Law can play a supporting role. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now ratified by 93 countries, can be read to prohibit signatories from providing financial assistance to nuclear weapons programs, strengthening the legal basis for investment exclusion in those jurisdictions. A report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons found that the number of financial institutions invested in nuclear weapons decreased by a quarter in the years since the treaty went into effect in 2021.
To be sure, the movement is still nascent. Investment exclusion campaigns have not yet produced significant reductions in nuclear weapons spending, and the political headwinds in some countries are real. Norway’s right-wing politicians are actively pushing to drop that country’s nuclear weapons exclusion criteria, and the EU’s December reclassification is a genuine setback, not merely a lobbying skirmish. The financial case against nuclear weapons manufacturers is younger and smaller in scale than the fossil fuel divestment movement at its height. But changes in industries such as tobacco and cluster munitions did not happen at once, and they rarely announced themselves in advance.
The mechanism is established. The question is whether citizens and institutions will choose to use it.
When the parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons conference closes, without the agreement the world needs, the question will again be asked: What else can be done? Citizen-investors have concrete avenues for action that do not require waiting for governments to agree. They can examine their own retirement allocations, press their municipality to follow the model of New York and Madison, or ask their local university why its endowment screens fossil fuel companies but not nuclear weapons manufacturers.
It is time to follow the money.
Annelise Riles is a professor of law at Northwestern University and author of Everyday Ambassador on Substack.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
