Don’t Bank on the Bomb does not list every single investment into the companies listed as part of the nuclear weapon industry. This selection of financial institutions is limited by a reporting threshold. Only share and bond holdings of at least 0.5% of the total number of outstanding shares or bonds of the nuclear weapon producing companies are listed. The reason for this is practical: a threshold of 0.1% for example would have resulted in a report profiling nearly 3,000 financial institutions, with mostly minuscule investments. Instead, this report focuses on the institutional investors which were found to have the most significant investments in one or more of the selected companies.
The information is also limited to information available in the public domain. Although the sources on which the information is based are reputable and well-known, they are themselves not comprehensive. The numbers provided in the report are therefore a conservative estimation of the total global investments in the nuclear weapons industry.