Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear weapons complex

  • The High Costs of Nuclear Arsenals

    David KriegerNuclear weapons are costly in many ways.  They change our relationship to other nations, to the earth, to the future and to ourselves.


    In the mid-1990s a group of researchers at the Brookings Institution did a study of US expenditures on nuclear weapons.  They found that the US had spent $5.8 trillion between 1940 and 1996 (in constant 1996 dollars). 


    This figure was informally updated in 2005 to $7.5 trillion from 1940 to 2005 (in constant 2005 dollars).  Today the figure is approaching $8 trillion, and that amount is for the US alone.


    There are currently nine countries with a total of over 20,000 nuclear weapons, spending $105 billion annually on their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems.  That will amount to more than $1 trillion over the next decade.  The US accounts for about 60 percent of this amount.


    The World Bank has estimated that $40 to $60 billion in annual global expenditures would be sufficient to meet the eight agreed-upon United Nations Millennium Development Goals for poverty alleviation by 2015. 


    Meeting these goals would eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality/empowerment; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop partnerships for development.


    The US is now spending over $60 billion annually on nuclear weapons and this is expected to rise to average about $70 billion annually over the next decade.  The US spends more than the other eight nuclear weapons states combined. 


    We are now planning to modernize our nuclear weapons infrastructure and also our nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.  This was part of the deal that President Obama agreed to for getting the New START agreement ratified in the Senate.  It may prove to be a bad bargain.


    The US foreign aid contribution in 2010 was $30 billion; in the same year, we spent $55 billion on our nuclear arsenal.  Which expenditures keep us safer?


    Another informative comparison is with the regular annual United Nations budget of $2.5 billion and the annual UN Peacekeeping budget of $7.3 billion.  UN and Peacekeeping expenditures total to about $10 billion, which is less than one-tenth of what is being spent by the nine nuclear weapon states for maintaining and improving their nuclear arsenals.


    The annual UN budget for its disarmament office (United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs) is $10 million.  The nuclear weapons states spend more than that amount on their nuclear weapons every hour.  Or, to put it another way, the nine nuclear weapons states annually spend 10,000 times more for their nuclear arsenals than the United Nations spends to pursue all forms of disarmament, including nuclear disarmament.


    The one place the US is saving money on its nuclear weapons is where it should be spending the most, and that is on the dismantlement of the retired weapons.  The amount that the US spends on dismantlement of its nuclear weapons has dropped significantly under the Obama administration from $186 million in 2009 to $96 million in 2010 to $58 million in 2011.  In the 1990s the US dismantled more than 1,000 nuclear weapons annually.  We dismantled 648 weapons in 2008 and only 260 in 2010.


    The US has about 5,000 nuclear weapons awaiting dismantlement, which, at the current rate of dismantlement, will take the US about 20 years.  There are another 5,000 US nuclear weapons that are either deployed or held in reserve.


    Beyond being very costly to maintain and improve, nuclear weapons have changed us and cost us in many other ways.


    They have undermined our respect for the law.  How can a country respect the law and be perpetually engaged in threatening mass murder?


    These weapons have also undermined our sense of reason, balance and morality.  They are designed to kill massively and indiscriminately – men, women and children.


    They have increased our secrecy and undermined our democracy.  Can you put a cost on losing our democracy?


    Uranium mining, nuclear tests and nuclear waste storage for the next 240,000 years have incalculable costs.  They are a measure of our hubris, as are the weapons themselves.


    Nuclear weapons – perhaps more accurately called instruments of annihilation – require us to play Russian Roulette with our common future.  What is the cost of threatening to foreclose the future?  What is the cost of actually doing so?

  • Obama Boosts Nukes

    This article was originally published by Foreign Policy In Focus.

    On February 1,
    the Obama administration delivered a budget request calling for a full
    10 percent increase in nuclear weapons spending next year, to be
    followed by further increases in subsequent years.    

    These increases, if enacted, would bring the recent six-year period
    of flat and declining nuclear weapons budgets to an abrupt end. Not
    since 2005 has Congress approved such a large nuclear weapons
    budget. Seeing Obama’s request Linton Brooks, who ran the National
    Nuclear Security Administration for President Bush from 2003 to 2007,
    remarked to Nuclear Weapons and Materials Monitor, “I would’ve killed for this kind of budget.”

    Largest Since Manhattan Project

    Obama’s request includes more than twice last year’s funding for a
    $5 billion upgrade to plutonium warhead core (“pit”) production
    facilities at Los Alamos. If the budget request passes intact, Los
    Alamos would see a 22 percent budget increase in a single year, its
    biggest since the Manhattan Project. 

    The request proposes major upgrades to certain bombs as well as the
    design, and ultimately production, of a new ballistic missile
    warhead. Warhead programs are increased almost across the board, with
    the notable exception of dismantlement, which is set to decline
    dramatically. A continued scientific push to develop simulations and
    experiments to partially replace nuclear testing is evident. 

    All these initiatives and others are embedded in an overall military
    budget bigger than any since the 1940s that includes renewed funding
    for the development of advanced delivery vehicles, cruise missiles, and
    plenty of money for nuclear deployments. 

    Linked to START

    This proposed “surge” responds to a December 2009 request
    from Senate Republicans (plus Lieberman) for significant increases in
    nuclear weapons spending. Such increases, these senators said, were necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) to obtain their ratification votes for a follow-on to the START treaty (which expired in December). 

    As of this writing the new treaty remains under negotiation.
    Ratification of any treaty requires 67 votes, a much higher hurdle than
    the 60 needed to break a filibuster. As the 2010 campaign season begins
    in earnest, it remains to be seen if this expansive nuclear spending
    package is anywhere near hawkish enough to buy the necessary votes. 

    Also, key politicians of both parties have pork-barrel interests in
    the nuclear weapons complex, interests not confined by the boundaries
    of their districts and states. In today’s Congress, money and influence
    flow freely across these lines. The contracts at stake are big by any
    standard. Nuclear weapons complex contractors are among the nation’s largest recipients of contract dollars. So far in FY 2010, seven of the top 10 U.S. contractors are nuclear weapons site management contractors or partners.  

    For their part, most Democrats assume — despite a small mountain of
    evidence otherwise — that a nuclear weapons spending surge is genuinely
    needed. Some of the administration officials behind this surge have
    been retained from the Bush administration. Others, like Undersecretary
    of State Ellen Tauscher, are Democratic hawks. There are no doves. 

    Squared with Prague?

    This increase in spending on the nuclear complex does not contradict
    Obama’s public statements, for example in Prague in April 2009, that he
    would “seek” nuclear disarmament. In contrast to Picasso’s famous
    dictum (“Others seek, I find”), Obama has said only that he would
    “seek” disarmament. Despite the powers theoretically available to him
    as commander-in-chief, which encompass every aspect of nuclear
    deployment and procurement, Obama has said nothing about finding disarmament. 

    In many ways the President is building on the rhetorical foundation
    laid in January 2007 by the so-called “Four Horsemen” — George Schultz,
    Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn — who with 16 others laid out their rationale
    for a “world free of nuclear weapons.” These men did not, either in
    their original op-ed or in their subsequent ones, actually advocate any
    but the vaguest steps toward actual disarmament. 

    What they offered instead was aspirational rhetoric that was
    all-too-uncritically received in most circles. Subsequently, three of
    the four supported the Bush administration’s Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) or its equivalent, and Perry co-convened an influential nuclear policy report that called for funding increases, new construction, and replacement warheads. Their op-ed
    last month calling for a big increase in nuclear weapons spending
    brought these rhetorical contradictions sharply into view. Nuclear
    disarmament, even as an aspiration, was missing.

    No New Nukes?

    Administration spokespersons have been quick to say there are no
    “new” warheads under consideration. That is because the word “new” can
    simply never be used in connection with warheads, no matter how many
    changes are involved. Last year’s Defense Authorization Act, authored
    by then-congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D-Livermore), builds a spectrum
    of potential innovation into the structure of the “Stockpile
    Management” program.

    Last year, the administration requested and received a great deal of
    money for what amounts to a new bomb, mostly for European deployment,
    without the embarrassment of talking about a “new” bomb like George
    Bush did. George Orwell would be proud. 

    These linguistic innovations go back to 1996, when weapons
    administrators and contractors sought a politically palatable path to
    warhead innovation. At that time, Clinton administration bureaucrats
    consciously chose to emphasize themes of “replacement” and
    “stewardship” in describing programs they knew (and privately said at
    the time) would result in new warheads. As attendees at one 1996
    meeting said,
    even “the use of the word ‘warhead’ may not be acceptable.” Linguistic
    cleansing paved the way for this month’s proposed spending surge. 

    Next Step: Congress

    Will Congress, especially the Democratic members of Congress, fund
    these increases? In part the answer depends on how seriously they take
    the several converging crises facing the country and the planet, and
    how seriously they address populist anger about the economy, especially
    in relation to their own reelection prospects. 

    In many ways the proposed nuclear weapons budget, and the defense
    budget overall, can be seen as bold raids on a diminishing pool of
    resources, as well as very real commitments to fading imperial
    pretensions. Nuclear weapons compete directly with the renewable energy
    and conservation jobs funded in the Energy and Water funding bills.  

    Congress therefore has to decide, and citizens have to help them
    decide, between a new generation of nuclear weapons and the factories
    to make them or the greener alternative of energy and climate security
    and the better economic prospects that would ensue.

    Nuclear weapons are an especially dangerous investment for a
    declining hegemon.  The sooner we choose a nuclear weapons path
    involving less and less money, not more and more, the sooner we will be
    able to wake from the hubris and pervasive violence currently
    destroying us.