“Real security for people means a health service that they can access where and when they need it, fully staffed, with hospitals that are safe… Spending money on nuclear weapons while hospital repairs, staff pay and care go unfunded is a choice.”
Rathi Guhadasan, Socialist Health Association Chair, writes on the crisis in the health sector and why we must prioritise healthcare not warfare.
Britain has committed to raising its defence spending. It will increase what it spends on the military to 2.6% of GDP by 2027/28 and 3.5% by 2035, which the Office for Budget Responsibility believes means spending roughly £40 billion more a year, from a base of £64.5 billion spent in 2024 by NATO’s calculations. To help pay for this, what are we choosing not to fund?
Well it seems we are choosing not to fund health, even though there is a clear and present danger to patients and staff. In August 2026, NHS England reported the waiting list for consultant-led elective treatment had risen to 7.3 million cases, involving around 6.2 million patients, with 111,379 people having to wait over a year.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has reported hundreds of excess deaths per week associated with overcrowding at accident and emergency departments and prolonged waits. The cost of clearing the NHS repair backlog has reached £15.9 billion, which the King’s Fund noted was more than the entire NHS capital budget for 2025/26. There are around 100,000 vacancies across the NHS in England, with skilled and experienced staff continuing to leave in a continual cycle of exhaustion, stress and burnout.
A Royal College of Nursing survey in May found that 93% of nursing students are worried about money, and 60% of those are cutting back on food and essential bills. The college warns this risks “choking the supply of nurses at the source”, and estimates that forgiving early-career nurses’ student debt could retain more than 12,000 of them. What frontline nurses are asking for is concrete: sustained investment in beds and the nursing workforce, alongside community and social care capacity. That is the kind of investment the £8 billion a year we currently spend on nuclear weapons could fund.
Yes, the UK government chooses Trident, its nuclear weapons system, over further investment in the NHS. CND has recently updated its estimate of the whole life cost of this system to £240 billion. What could that money be used for instead?
Over a service life of about 30 years, £240 billion is roughly £8 billion a year. According to CND’s People not Nukes research, this would fund 220,000 extra nurses. Given the Health Foundation’s upper estimate of an £18 billion-a-year social care funding gap by 2033, £240 billion would cover that gap for more than 13 years. This amount is also about fifteen times the entire NHS repair backlog.
Health spending also supports more jobs per pound spent. The Political Economy Research Institute found that in America, $1 billion creates close to 20,000 jobs in health care, versus 11,600 in the military.
A planned transition for defence workers, with guaranteed retraining and employment, and engineering capacity redirected into NHS equipment and green manufacturing, would not only advance healthcare but defend the NHS against the climate emergency, to which the defence industry makes a significant causal contribution.
UK A&Es faced record-breaking demand this summer, due in no small part to the heatwave we experienced. During the hottest June on record, the Royal College of Nursing reports nearly 3,200 patients a day were being cared for in hospital corridors, a 10% rise on the previous month.
By August, calls to the RCN’s advice line described wards, care homes and offices regularly topping 30°C, often without air conditioning or windows that open. One member said it “gets to the point you dread going to work“, and one nurse on an unventilated ward collapsed from dehydration and needed treatment at their own hospital. Nurses’ testimony gathered in January described a patient left in a chair for four days and another who died after choking unnoticed in a corridor, with staff holding up sheets to protect patients’ dignity.
The same healthcare versus warfare spending trade-off plays out globally. The ONE Campaign estimates that UK cuts to Gavi and the Global Fund alone could contribute to more than 600,000 avoidable deaths. Pandemics do not respect borders, and global health security is national security.
Real security for people means a health service that they can access where and when they need it, fully staffed, with hospitals that are safe. It means social care for all and protection from the next pandemic. Spending money on nuclear weapons while hospital repairs, staff pay and care go unfunded is a choice. It can be made differently. That is the case for Healthcare not Warfare, Nurses not Nukes.
- You can find out more about CND’s People not Nukes campaign here.
- Rathi Guhadasan is the Chair of the Socialist Health Association. You can follow the Socialist Health Association (SHA) on Facebook and Twitter/X.
- This article was originally published by the CND on 2 October 2026.
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