Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940.

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Author: John Mendelsohn
Date: Winter 1998
From: Issues in Science and Technology(Vol. 15, Issue 2)
Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
Document Type: Book review
Length: 1,526 words

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Stephen I. Schwartz, ed. Bruce G. Blair, Thomas S. Blanton, William Burr, Steven M. Kosiak, Arjun Makhijani, Robert S. Norris, Kevin O'Neill, John E. Pike, and William J. Weida, contributing authors. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998, 680pp.

After a truly admirable research effort, Stephen Schwartz and his colleagues have calculated for the first time the cost of all aspects of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, from its inception in 1940 to the end of 1996. In constant 1996 dollars, the authors estimate total U.S. spending at a stunning $5.48 trillion dollars, or roughly 29 percent of all military spending ($18.7 trillion) during those years. These costs include building, deploying, targeting, and controlling nuclear weapons, defending against them, dismantling them, compensating victims, protecting secrets, managing nuclear waste, and remediating the environment. The $5.48 trillion, they point out, exceeds all other categories of government spending during this period, except for nonnuclear national defense ($13.2 trillion) and social security ($7.9 trillion). On average, the cost of developing and maintaining the nuclear arsenal equaled nearly $98 billion per year during that span, and the total figure amounted to almost 11 percent of all government expenditure.

In chapters devoted to each of the categories noted above, the authors trace the history of nuclear-related programs, their budgets (or best-guess estimates thereof), and their successes, failures, and excesses. This, the main part of the book, makes two invaluable contributions to the literature on and the debate over U.S. nuclear policy. First, it aggregates all that had been known, as well as a great deal that the authors themselves uncovered or reconstructed during their research, about the costs of the U.S. nuclear infrastructure. Although the authors acknowledge that their estimate is not definitive - much relevant data has been lost, classified, or never existed - Atomic Audit presents as good an overall accounting of our nuclear weapons investment as we are likely to get for the foreseeable future. The bottom line is that nuclear weapons, when all the costs of their supporting infrastructure are taken into account, demonstrably do not provide security on the cheap. Moreover, they write, "government officials over more than 50 years failed consistently to ensure that what was spent on nuclear weapons was spent wisely and in the most efficient manner."

The second major...

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Gale Document Number: GALE|A54036612