AR Tool Places Nuclear Costs Inside US Classrooms
An educational campaign has introduced an augmented reality tool aimed at helping students in the United States understand the financial scale of maintaining a nuclear weapons arsenal.
The initiative, known as Class Dismissed, has been developed in partnership with Up in Arms, a campaign founded by Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen, and the nonprofit media lab Amplifier. It is designed for use in school environments, allowing pupils to view digital representations of nuclear weapons through augmented reality devices within familiar spaces.
The project centres on showing how federal spending decisions are distributed across sectors. By placing life-sized visualisations of nuclear weapons in classrooms, gymnasiums, libraries, and on school grounds, the campaign links national defence expenditure to everyday school environments. The representations are intended to show the scale of such systems in relation to the locations where students learn, making abstract budget figures more immediate and observable.
Campaign materials indicate that the models presented through the tool are based on existing nuclear weapons programmes and reflect documented financial commitments. The representations are derived from publicly available reporting and nonpartisan budget analysis, with the intention of aligning the visual content closely with real-world data rather than imaginary scenarios. This approach connects digital imagery with verified spending figures and programme details.
The initiative also illustrates the balance between defence allocations and domestic funding. It examines the relationship between rising military expenditure and conditions within schools, including pressures related to class sizes, infrastructure, and staffing. By placing visualisations of weapons systems within these environments, the campaign frames federal budget priorities in a way that can be directly experienced inside educational spaces.
Amplifier founder Aaron Huey, who serves as the project’s creative director, has identified augmented reality as a tool capable of depicting objects that cannot be physically introduced into such settings. The technology enables the placement of simulated nuclear systems in real-life environments, allowing users to observe them at full scale within the context of daily school life. This method links policy decisions to visual representations that can be examined up close.
The campaign’s financial estimates are based on projections from the Congressional Budget Office. In 2025, the office reported that planned activities by the United States Department of Defence and the Department of Energy to operate, sustain and modernise nuclear forces, while also developing new systems, are expected to cost $946 billion between 2025 and 2034. This equates to an average annual expenditure of approximately $95 billion over the period.
The projected total includes several categories of spending. Around $357 billion is allocated to the operation and sustainment of current and future nuclear forces, along with associated support activities. A further $309 billion is allocated to modernising strategic and tactical delivery systems and the weapons they carry. Additional funding includes $72 billion for upgrades to facilities and equipment within the nuclear weapons laboratory complex, and $79 billion for improvements to command, control, communications and early-warning systems.
The estimate also includes $129 billion to account for potential additional costs beyond the projected budget. This figure is calculated using past trends of cost growth across defence programmes, providing a wider assessment of anticipated expenditure over the defined timeframe.
By uniting these financial projections with augmented reality visualisations, the Class Dismissed initiative presents a way to transmit complex budget data within school environments. The campaign links national defence spending with the physical spaces used for education, using digital representations to demonstrate how public resources are assigned and experienced at a human scale.
