U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project

An Audit of the Moral and Monetary Cost of American Nuke Endeavors

Dec 21, 2008

Since 1940, the United States nuclear weapons arsenal has had high environmental, public, and moral costs for the entire world; they were enumerated in a recent study.

Everyone engendered just before and long after 1940 has the dubious distinction of being part of an atomic generation. In August 1998, the Brookings Institution concluded the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project to assess the effects on those citizens of the world living in the nuclear age.

Stephen I. Schwartz served as director for the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project (NWCSP), funded by the Brookings Institute. He took on the job in 1994, condensing more than fifty years of historical record into a congealed reporting of his conclusions a mere four years later.

Schwartz has an deep background in foreign policy studies and formerly served as head of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. In somewhat of a culmination of that experience, Schwartz authored "Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940."

Counting the Cost

According to Schartz's study, the United States spent nearly $5.5 trillion, over the course of 56 years, on the manufacture of nuclear weapons and on programs related to their development. While researchers conducting the study attempted to document both major and obscure investments into nuclear technology on the part of the United States government, the sum neccessarily omits at least some financed ventures, according to Schwartz.

During the Cold War, a vast amount of U.S. funds were spent on proliferation of nuclear weapons. From the 1950s to the 1970s, huge investments were made in the building of bombers, nuclear silos, and other machinery for the United States' nuclear stockpile. Since the event of a nuclear attack on U.S. soil always loomed during the Cold War, a strategy for domestic cleanup and containment of nuclear fallout was critical. As a result, so-called "cleanup" programs have also cost the U.S. a fair amount of money over the years. Maintenance of existing weapons has also been a necessary and costly byproduct of building a nuclear weapons arsenal.

On Shaky Moral Ground

The NWCSP has trouble calculating the moral cost of nuclear proliferation to people worldwide; that cost is a qualitative one, immeasurable by the euro, yen, or dollar. Radioactive fallout persisted for generations of Japanese civilians following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rules of war are commonly employed by U.S. leaders as justification for the military acts, but several key scientists and politicians involved in the development of the U.S. development and use of a nuclear arsenal have since retracted their original zeal.

Of nuclear weapons, Robert Oppenheimer, co-author of the tragically genius technology behind The Manhattan Project said, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

The copyright of the article U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project in Disarmament is owned by Cheron Taylor. Permission to republish U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.