Paying for The Bomb:
U.S. spent $5 trillion building its arsenal, think tank says
By Bruce Kennedy
CNN Interactive
The Cold War may have ended several years ago, but its true costs, both human and economic, are still coming to light.
In June 1998, the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, published "Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940."
The book is the result of four years of research through mountains of documents and is an unprecedented examination of how much cold cash went into America's nuclear deterrent during the Cold War.
According to "Atomic Audit," since 1940 the United States has spent at least $5,481,083,000,000 -- that's nearly $5.5 trillion -- in constant 1996 dollars on its nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs. The figure does not include an estimated $320 billion for future and some present costs for the storage and disposal of nuclear wastes and weapons.
The study's contributors offer a more concrete way to visualize the numbers given:
Distributed evenly to everyone in the United States, the cost of nuclear weapons comes to $21,646 per person;
Represented as a brick of new $1 bills (such as the type available in banks, with $200 per inch), the stack of bills spent for nuclear weapons would stretch to the moon and nearly back to Earth; and
Laid end-to-end, those bricks of $1 bills would encircle the Earth at the equator more than 100 times, building a wall nearly nine feet high.
Stephen Schwartz, director of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project, edited and co-authored "Atomic Audit." He notes in the book's introduction that the United States still spends about $35 billion each year -- more than $96 million a day -- on its nuclear arsenal and related programs. And he says that, despite arguments that the U.S. deterrent helped Washington and its allies win the Cold War, the "losing side" still has roughly the same amount of nuclear weapons as the "winning side."
"There's nothing wrong with preparing," Schwartz says, "but you don't abandon good accounting practices while you're doing it. Even if we were in a war to the death with the Soviets, as people thought we were, you don't waste money on valuable resources."
He cites as an example an effort by the U.S. Air Force and Atomic Energy Commission, between 1946 and 1961, to create a nuclear-powered aircraft. According to "Atomic Audit," the failed program cost more than $7 billion before it was canceled by President Kennedy.
"You want to make sure you really are getting a bigger bang for the buck," says Schwartz. "As a result of our work, we found a lot of programs that contributed absolutely nothing to the effort."
But critics of the Brookings study say "Atomic Audit" is another example of revisionist history.
"That's not to say I think their figures are inaccurate, but I think they were researched with an ideological agenda in mind -- that the United States investment in nuclear weapons was not worth it," says Baker Spring, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "The total package won us the Cold War -- conventional and nuclear weapon capabilities, intelligence policies, our basic stance as a free society. It was a society-to-society competition."
For his part, Schwartz says he is not condemning the U.S. nuclear weapons deterrent.
"It's not that this program was an immense waste," he adds, "but that we didn't go in with our eyes open. There was a profound lack of understanding. It allows decision-makers to make decisions without full information in front of them, and that can come back to haunt you."
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