Financial institutions are increasing their investments in atomic weapons production, anti-nuclear campaigners have said, warning the trend risked fuelling already surging military spending at a time when global conflicts are multiplying.
Experts have been warning of a new atomic arms race at a time when nuclear-armed states are involved in conflicts in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, while long-standing efforts towards disarmament and non-proliferation appear to be eroding.
In a fresh report released on Friday, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and another anti-nuclear pressure group, PAX, said a growing number of financial institutions were investing in companies helping the world’s nine nuclear-armed states swell and modernise their arsenals.
As of September 2025, 301 banks, pension funds, insurance companies and other financial institutions had financing or investments in companies involved in producing nuclear weapons, according to the annual “Don’t Bank on the Bomb” report.
That marked a 15-percent hike compared to a year earlier, reversing years of decline, it said.
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‘Risky’
“For the first time in years, the number of investors trying to profit from an arms race is on the rise,” said ICAN’s director of programmes Susi Snyder, a contributing author of the report.
“This is a short term and risky strategy that contributes to a dangerous escalation,” she warned in a statement, adding that it was “impossible to profit from an arms race without feeding one”.
The world’s nine nuclear-armed states — Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea — are currently modernising and often expanding their arsenals and “driving demands for these weapons”, the report said.
In February, New START — the last remaining treaty between Russia and the United States limiting the top nuclear powers’ deployment of nuclear warheads — lapsed.
The stock market valuation of many major defence contractors had risen sharply, the report said.