Jun 14, 2025 Current Resources

Ben & Jerry’s Co-Founder Launches Up In Arms, A Four-Year Anti-militarism Campaign to Reclaim the American Dream Ahead of Trump’s Military Parade

“There will be no peace, there will be no security, until we start using our resources to provide for the needs of our people at home and around the world,” Ben Cohen.

Video of the press conference
Fair-use images of speakers and installation
Campaign website

Washington, D.C. (June 13, 2025) – Standing alongside a group of retired military officers and national security experts, Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerr’s Ice cream, announced the launch of a new four-year campaign, Up In Arms – a movement to bring common sense to the Department of Defense and the country’s budgetary bottom line.

The group kicked off with a press conference and a 3-story-tall installation exposing the absurd scale of the U.S. nuclear budget. One nuclear bomb killed over 100,000 people in Hiroshima. The US current nuclear arsenal contains 50,000 times the explosive capacity of a Hiroshima-size bomb. The size of the money brick installation equals the volume of space required to hold $100 billion in $100 bills. Half of which is devoted to building new nuclear weapons, threatening to ignite a new global arms race. The brick houses a multimedia center that details the figure’s human and financial costs. It will remain on display at Union Station through Monday, June 16.

“There will be no peace, there will be no security, until we start using our resources to provide for the needs of our people at home and around the world,” said Ben Cohen. And we have the money to do it, at no additional taxpayer expense. If we take half the money budgeted for the Pentagon and invested in the things people need and want, the American Dream can become a reality again.”

The United States currently spends more on war and war preparations than the next ten countries combined. While over 50 million people in America are at risk of going hungry, Congress plans to cut food assistance while increasing Pentagon spending to over $1 trillion per year, including nearly $100 billion for new nuclear weapons.

The Up In Arms campaign outlines an alternative path where Americans’ basic needs, like housing, healthcare, childcare, can be fully funded without raising taxes. By reinvesting Pentagon dollars, the campaign argues, the U.S. will move closer to true safety and security.

“We’re here today to say we don’t want our money spent this way, we want our money spent… on things that keep people alive, not on things that kill people,” said Col. Ann Wright, with Eisenhower Media Network and Veterans Against Genocide. “We’re up in arms and down on these damn nuclear weapons, and We the People have to be able to go to each one of these Congresspeople and say, ‘We don’t care how much money you’re getting from all of these companies that make a killing out if killing with these nuclear weapons.’”

“[Our] defense budget is larger than the next ten countries combined, and what do we get for it?” asked Major General Dennis Laich of Eisenhower Media Network. “Since World War II, we tied in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, we won the first Gulf War, we lost in Iraq, and we lost in Afghanistan… they always say we have the greatest military on earth; I don’t buy it.”

“The rest of the world has less than 15 overseas bases; we have almost 800,” said Col. Larry Wilkerson. “And they cost you, by DoD’s own admission… $75 billion to maintain. And here’s what they really do: they facilitate war, they generate war. This is an extremely dangerous phenomenon that you pay for every day, and you are going to pay for it, I fear, as are we all, in more and more wars… we need to rein them in, we need to go Up in Arms.”

To learn more about the Up in Arms campaign, visit www.upinarms.com.