Really?
We have roughly the same number of warheads as the entire world combined. We spend around $6-7B each year to maintain these weapons. Does 2000 instead of 10,000 accurately deliverable weapons really make us weaker? The government spent around $51T on EVERYTHING from 1940-1996. 10% was on nuclear weapons alone. Click on the link for a breakdown.
Ignorance is truly infinite.....with a half-life much longer than that of weapons-grade plutonium apparently.
U.S. Government Historical Obligations by Function, 1940-1996
The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project was completed in August 1998 and resulted in the book Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 edited by Stephen I. Schwartz. These project pages should be considered historical.
Total = $51.558 trillion
http://www.brookings.edu/projects/archive/nucweapons/figure2.aspx
Note: National defense category has been adjusted to exclude nuclear weapons and infrastructure costs. Nuclear weapons costs are a combination of actual and estimated expenditures. Program totals do not match overall total because of rounding and the addition of undistributed offsetting receipts (not shown).
Sources: Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Brookings, 1998); Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 1998, (GPO, 1997), pp. 42-49.
Copyright ? 1998 The Brookings Institution
