A new, not widely publicized report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has interesting things to say about what we spend for our nuclear weapons program and how we spend it. Since the financials on our atomic stockpile aren't kept in a single ledger, the authors, Stephen I. Schwartz and Deepti Choubey, had to cull information from multiple accounts in multiple agencies to put together a picture of what the program costs—a situation that should be remedied, they say, to help Congress and future administrations keep tabs on its cost.
The total they came up with—which is not definitive, partly because it's based only on unclassified information—is $52.4 billion for the year 2008. That's the cost of maintaining and upgrading the U.S.'s 9,600 nuclear warheads and the systems that would deliver them. (It excludes the costs of intelligence related to nuclear issues.)
It's worth noticing that that $52.4 billion was $13 billion more than the $39.5 billion the U.S. spent on diplomacy and foreign aid last year. And, at a time when the future of the nation and the world may hinge on energy research, the nuclear program also ate up $15.9 billion from the Department of Energy, 67 percent of the DOE's budget.
Only $700 million, or about 1.3 percent, of funding for the nuclear program went for safety—for "preparing for the consequences of a nuclear or radiological attack." About $5 billion went to fight the threat of global nuclear proliferation.
In addition, the authors note, the nuclear weapons program "consumes& nearly double what the United States allots for general science, space, and technology; and 14 times what the Department of Energy (DOE) budgets for all energy-related research and development."
The authors note that spending tens of billions on nuclear housekeeping doesn't of itself keep the country safe. "Greater fiscal and programmatic emphasis," they write, "should be placed on programs that seek to secure and prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, weapons materials and technical knowledge, and to eliminate threats posed by such weapons, materials and knowledge."
