[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Mr.Schwartz is theauthor of Nuclear Security Spending: AssessingCosts, Examining Priorities (Carnegie Endowmentfor International Peace) and the editor and co-authorof Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences ofU.S.Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Brookings Institution Press).Derrick Jensen: How much has the U.S.nuclearweapons program cost?Stephen Schwartz: Well, in late 1993 we started thebook Atomic Audit in order to answer that question.It took us about four years.One reason it took solong is that we soon discovered this was the firsttime anybody had actually attempted to calculatethis.We kept thinking the figures must be hiddenaway somewhere in the government, and if wecould find them we could just pull them out andupdate them.But it turns out that the governmentnever even kept track of the costs. All that said, our best guess, and this really shouldbe looked at more as a floor than a ceiling, is thatbetween 1940, when the U.S.made its first paymentfor work connected with the development of nuclearweapons, through 1996, when we stopped counting,the United States government spent about $5.5trillion.That s in adjusted 1996 dollars, so we veremoved the effects of inflation, meaning a dollar in1950 in our study is worth the same as a dollar in1990.Since 1996 the government has spentapproximately $35 billion dollars a year.You can dothe math and see what s been spent since then.We also looked at the incurred costs for the nuclearweapons program things we knew the governmentwould be spending money on in the future and thatwe could estimate with relative precision thingslike cleaning up nuclear waste from past nuclearweapons production, compensating people harmedby nuclear weapons testing activities, dismantlingsurplus nuclear weapons, and storing surplusnuclear weapons material.When you add all thosecosts in, you get up to about $5.8 trillion, which isobviously an enormous amount of money any wayyou look at it.If you were to dole it out to everybody living in the country in 1996, it would have come toalmost twenty-two thousand dollars per person,enough to buy everybody a nice new car.Or youcould stack the money up to the moon and nearlyback again in one dollar bills.A lot of people don t like those comparisons.Theysay, Well, if you spread that money out among allthe people who were alive over that fifty-five years, itends up being something like a dollar a day, sowhat s the big deal? Well, the big deal is that wedidn t know what we were spending, and we endedup spending way too much.The nuclear weaponsprogram is the third most expensive program theU.S.government has ever undertaken, behind onlyall other national defense programs including WorldWar II about $13.2 trillion and social security,which at this point is sort of a quasi-governmentprogram, at about $7.9 trillion.The nuclear weaponsprogram amounts to eleven percent of allgovernment expenditures between 1940 and 1996,an average of nearly $98 billion per year.When the book came out, that shocked a lot ofpeople.It didn t, unfortunately, shock enough politicians.We were expecting a big reaction onCapitol Hill, but it didn t happen.There was almosttotal silence.DJ: Considering the fiscal horrors that characterizethe military, in some ways it doesn t surprise me thatno one counted the costs.SS: It surprised us.And the interesting thing wasthat the Air Force initially did try to conduct an auditof the program, in response, ironically, to criticismfrom Congress that they weren t spending enoughmoney on nuclear weapons.In about 1950 amember of Congress did some creative math whatGeorge W.Bush would call fuzzy math andcalculated the government was only spending something like three cents out of every militarydollar for nuclear weapons.He said this amount was unreasonably and imprudently small, and that theU.S. must go all-out on the nuclear weaponsprogram.DJ: How was the math fuzzy?SS: It didn t include a whole bunch of other costs,such as the delivery systems the means of gettingthe weapons to their target which at that point wasstrictly Strategic Air Command bomber aircraft.Andit only included some but not all of the costs of theAtomic Energy Commission.Today you ll see the same sort of fuzzy math,although different tricks are used.Figures put out by the Defense Department show that we re spendinga relatively small amount of money, but all theycount is a portion of the delivery systems.Theydon t count any other costs of the Department ofEnergy which took over for the Atomic EnergyCommission the costs of overseeing thewarheads, and so on.Part of the problem was that the military budgetwasn t set up to discriminate between nuclear andnon-nuclear spending, and Air Force auditors andother people found it too difficult to pull the costsapart, because they were in some sensesinterconnected.So they just gave up, and said toCongress, You ll have to trust us when we saywe re spending enough money. Another reason there was no accountability was areal lack of inquisitiveness on the part of the electedrepresentatives who were allocating this money on aregular basis annually and sometimes even semi-annually, when there were emergency spendingbills to the tune of tens or hundreds of billions ofdollars.Now, the people doling out the money had ageneral sense of the scale of the program.They knew, for example, how many factories wereproducing nuclear weapons, they knew more or lesshow many nuclear weapons were being tested, andeventually they found out how many weapons werein the arsenal, although even that was a closely heldsecret for many years.And of course they knewwhat the government was spending on things likebomber aircraft, submarines, and all that.But noone had ever tried to piece the whole puzzletogether.Lately I ve been seeing everything through the lensof home renovations, probably because I ve beenrenovating my home, and it s occurred to me thatthe way the country handled the nuclear weaponsprogram would be analogous to looking at only thecosts of the subcontractor who did the plumbing, orthe electrical work, or the framing, yet neverbothering to look at the entire cost.You may havean impression, but that s all it is. DJ: How did we come to spend so much money?SS: Nuclear weapons are closely interconnected, ofcourse, with the Cold War
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Tematy
IndexMartha Chamallas, Jennifer Wriggins The Measure of Injury, Race, Gender, and Tort Law (2010)
Rinus van Schendelen More Machiavelli in Brussels, The Art of Lobbying the EU, 3rd Edition (2010)
Cathy J. Cohen Democracy Remixed, Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (2010)
Simon Pirani Change in Putin's Russia. Power, Money and People (2010)
Mark Ribowsky The Supremes; A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal (2010)(1)
Steven Green The Second Disestablishment, Church and State in Nineteenth Century America (2010)
Jonathan Simon Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents, 1890 1950 (2010)
§ Weaver Tim Zanurzyć się w mrok
Wireless.A.to.Z Nathan.J.Muller McGraw.Hill 2003(1)
Daniel Keys Moran Emerald Eyes