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- Don’t Bank on the Bomb: a global report on the financing of nuclear weapons producers, Susi Snyder and Wilbert van der Zeijden, IKV Pax Christi, October 2013, pp. 284 (ISBN: 978-90-70443-26-9)
Don’t Bank on the Bomb: a global report on the financing of nuclear weapons producers, Susi Snyder and Wilbert van der Zeijden, IKV Pax Christi, October 2013, pp. 284 (ISBN: 978-90-70443-26-9)
01 October 2013
The report begins by observing that: “Almost seventy years after the first use of nuclear weapons, about 17,000 still remain today”. Countries with nuclear weapons plan to spend more than US $1 trillion over the next ten years to maintain and upgrade them: “While the majority of that comes from taxpayers... this report shows that the private sector is investing over US $314,349,920,000 in the private companies that produce, maintain, and modernise the nuclear arsenals in France, India, the UK and the US.”
The report explores the private sector’s capital investments in 27 companies that produce, maintain and modernise the nuclear weapons programmes of France, India, United Kingdom, Israel and the USA. The companies are based in the United States, United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and India and profiles of them are provided in Chapter 2 of the report.
Chapter 3 looks at 12 financial institutions that have a clearly published policy excluding investments in nuclear weapons companies and they are rewarded with a place in the report’s ‘Hall of Fame’. An additional 20 financial institutions, whose policy is not as comprehensive in scope as those of the company’s found in the Hall of Fame, are runners up (Chapter 4).
Finally, a total of 298 institutions, those most heavily invested in nuclear weapons producing companies, are listed alphabetically in the ‘Hall of Shame’ (Chapter 5), together with the estimated amounts invested in producers, as well as the type of financial relations that they have with these companies.
The authors argue that financiers should be more aware of the importance of their financial choices and how they could “have a significant impact in creating a better world for all by making ethical investment decisions”. The report is available as a free download at:
http://www.dontbankonthebomb.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/DBOTB2013-FINAL.pdf (pdf)