The arithmetic of the war economy and what it costs the rest of us.
In May 2026, the Congressional Budget Office released its estimate for Golden Dome, the Trump administration’s proposed space-based missile defense system. The number: $1.2 trillion over twenty years. That is the conservative estimate. The American Enterprise Institute projected a more expansive version at $3.6 trillion, rising to $4.4 trillion adjusted for projected inflation. And even at that cost, the AEI noted, the system would “fall short of 100 percent effectiveness.”
In the same period, the UN Relief Coordinator appealed for $23 billion in humanitarian funding for 2026 enough, he said, to save 87 million lives. The global humanitarian system in 2025 received $20.5 billion. The gap between what was needed and what was available cost, by some estimates, more than 400,000 lives worldwide over the medium term.
Fifty-three times more money for a weapons system of uncertain effectiveness than the UN needed to save 87 million people. That is not a budget decision. It is a statement of priorities made in plain arithmetic.
What Bruce Gagnon Has Spent Forty Years Saying
Bruce Gagnon co-founded the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space in 1992. He is a Vietnam-era Air Force veteran who became a peace organizer while still in uniform, someone who understood from the inside what the military-industrial complex costs and how it sustains itself.
He has spent four decades making one consistent argument: the weaponization of space is not a defense program. It is an economic program, a mechanism for transferring public resources to defense contractors while foreclosing the political possibility of funding healthcare, education, housing, and the local food systems that actually keep communities safe.
Golden Dome is the current iteration of that argument. Trump stated it would cost $175 billion and be operational by 2029. The CBO put the cost at $1.2 trillion. Independent analysts put it at $3.6 trillion. Historically, missile defense systems have exceeded initial cost estimates and schedules consistently, the US has spent approximately $400 billion on missile defense since Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, and the technology still cannot reliably intercept advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles under real-world conditions.
Meanwhile, Congress has been asked to transfer Medicare and Medicaid to states that do not have the funds to cover them because, the argument goes, the federal government cannot afford these programs.
Keep Space for Peace Week, October 3–10, 2026, is the Global Network’s annual call to communities to make this connection visible. Not as an abstraction. As an arithmetic problem with a moral dimension.
The Communities That Chose Differently
Saving Walden’s World was made partly because Jim Merkel spent his early career on the other side of this calculation. He was an arms dealer, the lead designer of top-secret cryptographic communications equipment for the US military, traveling the world to sell it. What changed him was understanding, slowly and then suddenly, what the money he was making was funding and who was paying the price for it.
He went to Kerala, Cuba, and Slovenia to find the communities that had made a different calculation. What he found was consistent: the societies that had achieved the best combination of ecological sustainability and human development were the ones that had redirected public resources toward education, healthcare, cooperative economics, and women’s empowerment, rather than toward military infrastructure that served the interests of distant contractors.
Kerala’s public education system, free through university for sixty years, was funded partly because the state made deliberate choices about what it would and would not spend public money on. Cuba’s healthcare system survived six decades of economic blockade because the government consistently prioritized it over military expansion. Slovenia’s cooperative economic institutions created a form of community resilience that does not require external defense to maintain, because communities that own their own resources and govern themselves have less to fear from the instabilities that military spending claims to address.
The elimination of nuclear weapons is not a naive aspiration. It is an economic reallocation, the same resources, directed toward the things that actually make communities safe.
