“Under Trump, the nuclear weapons industry has boomed – Expansion could be scaled back as President-elect Biden and Congress prioritize pandemic and recession problems.”
Center for Public Integrity, December 23, 2020
While the country has been coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, economic decline, and the election, President Donald Trump’s administration quietly and steadily steered America’s nuclear weapons industry to its largest expansion since the end of the Cold War, increasing spending on such arms by billions of dollars with bipartisan congressional support.
Overall, the budget for making and maintaining nuclear warheads has risen more than 50 percent since Trump was elected in 2016, substantially outpacing the rates of increase for the defense budget and overall federal spending during his presidency before the pandemic. On Monday, Congress approved Trump’s proposal to increase spending next year alone for the production of such weaponry by roughly $3 billion.
President-elect Joe Biden may embrace other priorities as he confronts the pandemic, tries to steer the country out of a recession, and is pressured to address social programs neglected under the Trump administration, as well as a ballooning deficit created by the 2017 Trump tax cuts and COVID-19 stimulus spending.
But the creation of a larger and more modern nuclear warhead complex of factories, laboratories, and related businesses is already playing out around the country, despite slowdowns in other federal projects due to the pandemic.
Four factories in Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee and New Mexico dedicated to producing warheads are being modernized. Four existing warheads are being substantially rebuilt with modern parts, on top of another such upgrade – costing $3.5 billion – that was completed last year. This pace compares with an average modernization of one type of warhead at a time during the Obama administration.
full article linked here: https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/future-of-warfare/under-trump-the-nuclear-weapons-industry-has-boomed/