Nuclear disarmament was the focus of last weekend’s meeting in Agra, India, between Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
In light of these negotiations, it is instructive to reflect on the “lessons learned” from the 50-year nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Ever since nuclear weapons were created during the closing days of World War II, America’s military leadership has defended their staggering cost with the assertion that atomic bombs — when compared to conventional weapons — are a relatively inexpensive means of deterring global war.
This argument — cynically referred to as the “‘getting more bang for your buck’ approach to strategic military planning” — continues to enable presidents, generals, politicians, and leaders of US defense industries to obtain nearly unanimous support for the sustainment and modernization of America’s nuclear arms.
Fifty years ago, some of America’s best scientific minds were called together to take part in effort to create and detonate the world’s first atomic bomb, code-named Trinity. That explosion, and the subsequent deployment of two atomic bombs against Japan during the summer of 1945, ushered the world into the nuclear age and, with it, forced Western countries to assume enormous yet poorly understood tangible and intangible cost for these weapons.
One early and influential nuclear arms proponent who embraced the “more bang for the buck” doctrine was former Senator Brien McMahon (R-Connecticut). In 1951, McMahon introduced legislation declaring “the cost of military fire power based upon atomic bombs is hundreds of times cheaper, dollar for dollar, than conventional explosives”.
McMahon, whose advocacy of a strong American nuclear arsenal earned him the nickname “The Atomic Senator,” further mandated in his 1951 Senate legislation that all US nuclear arms budgets, will be significantly increased in order to “go all-out in atomic development and production” so that “the Army, Navy, and Air Force” could be “rapidly equipped” with “our best and cheapest weapon.”
For Americans, secrecy and fear of the Soviet Union kept many people from learning — or really wanting to know — the comprehensive costs of the nuclear arsenal the United States was bent on amassing. Faced with the threat of annihilation, the economic consequences of a nuclear arms race seemed relatively unimportant.
However, with the end of the Cold War, the United States undertook a serious examination of its economic health. This assessment of America’s economic well being has also prompted the American government to scrutinize government spending, shrinking or eliminating programs and taking other measures to reduce the deficit.
This introspective turn in government fiscal policy was the motivation for the Brookings Institute, a Washington-based defense and foreign policy “think tank,” to initiate an unprecedented study on the actual costs of the US nuclear arsenal.
The Brookings study revealed that the United States has spent far more on nuclear weapons than it has acknowledged, about one-fourth to one-third of the entire military budget since 1945.
The total nuclear price tag of nearly $4 trillion, translated into today’s dollars under a formula created by the Pentagon, is a sum of the costs of research and development, weapons delivery systems, security, communications and control systems, dismantlement costs, and environmental cleanup.
Until now, no one — not even procurement officials at the Pentagon — has attempted to tally all nuclear weapons spending, much of which is included in the budget of the Department of Energy or its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission.
The editor of the study, Steven L. Schwartz, argues that the “more bang for the buck” nuclear advocates were deliberately misled or simply uninformed about the true costs of nuclear weapons. The development and production of nuclear weapons “wasn’t done on the cheap,” says Schwartz, who explains that the bottom-line price for nuclear arms only appeared to be inexpensive because the costs were spread among various budgets, were kept secret and were seldom questioned by Congress.
Schwartz worries that the licentious fiscal policies that permitted nuclear arms programs to flourish virtually unchecked for 50 years may also be having an effect on other American military arms development programs.
“The constitutional systems of checks and balances were rarely applied to the nuclear weapons program,” Schwartz writes in his report, ‘Atomic Audit: What the US Nuclear Arsenal Really Cost’. “A cloistered bureaucracy, largely unaccountable to Congress, managed the program. Congress frequently neglected its oversight function, allowing decades of wasteful spending.”
Schwartz’ concerns seem to have some merit. Shortly after the release of his study, the General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of Congress, concluded that the Department of Energy should be stripped of its oldest and most nettlesome mission: Making nuclear bombs and cleaning up its environmentally devastated facilities. The GAO study — authored by experts ranging from former President Jimmy Carter and physicist Edward Teller — said the Energy Department needed to be “reinvented” to meet a changing world, tighter budgets and decreased demand for its nuclear expertise. The authors of the GAO study suggest that the role of Energy Department should be limited to formulating and guiding energy policy, such as devising energy-conservation programs or collecting, analyzing and distributing energy information.
