Lowest cost estimate: $108,000 per minute for 30 years

October 10, 2024 11:01 AM

The Price: America is Updating Its Nuclear Weapons Systems (slNYT) (Archive) Part of the Series: The Brink (archive)
posted by lalochezia (42 comments total)

To put it in perspective: The Manhattan Project cost about $30 billion, adjusted for inflation, over the course of World War II. The United States is on pace to spend nearly double that amount each year for at least 30 years.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:24 AM on October 10 [1 favorite]

Forgive the derail, but: I wish journalists would do a better job of helping people contextualize magnitudes.

I get that the number they started with was $130 billion over thirty years, and that's a meaningless number to most of us, so they wanted to help somehow, but... how does converting to dollars per minute actually help?

There's so many other ways to do it that would actually provide useful context: compare it to the size of other large federal programs; tell us what percentage of GDP, or of the US budget, or the military budget, that will represent for those 30 years; work out what it comes to per capita; compare it to previous investments in nuclear weapons; I don't know, but give me *something* actually meaningful.

Dollars per minute is just like one of those "placed end-to-end they'd reach to the moon!" factlets that's all breathlessness and zero enlightenment.
posted by bfields at 11:27 AM on October 10 [35 favorites]

(Oh and I missed the Manhattan project comparison at the end, that's more helpful! And, oops, sorry, I should've said 1.7 trillion over thirty years, not 130 billion, the latter was just one project.)
posted by bfields at 11:30 AM on October 10 [5 favorites]

Here's one for you: if you take the net worth of the current top 10 richest people according to Forbes, it would more than pay for the $1.7T, and if you divided the extra among them, they'd all still be billionaires.
posted by tempestuoso at 11:32 AM on October 10 [31 favorites]

I work on a key, budget line item flight project, and it makes me furious to see numbers like that spent on weapons we must never use. Meanwhile, projects that will address climate change are dying under budgetary pressure.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 11:37 AM on October 10 [35 favorites]

I remember how we laughed and laughed about the Soviets spending themselves to oblivion
posted by credulous at 11:41 AM on October 10 [30 favorites]

The Manhattan Project produced three fission devices - Trinity, Fat Man, and Little Boy. The US nuclear arsenal is now what, five thousand thermonuclear warheads? So spending one Manhattan Project per year does not even seem that outrageous, considering the vastly larger arsenal involved now?
posted by rustcrumb at 11:44 AM on October 10 [6 favorites]

That's 42,500 Casa Bonitas.
posted by credulous at 11:47 AM on October 10 [11 favorites]

I totally agree that, to the vast majority of readers, these numbers are functionally equivalent to saying "1.5239439 kajillion buckeroos." It's undoubtedly a lot of money, but there are varying degrees of "a lot."

But the article also says it's "almost $57 billion a year ... for three decades." The US population is 333 million, so $1 billlion is $3 per person, so that's about $170 per person, per year. US GDP is about $25 trillion, so that's about 0.2 percent of GDP. The U.S. military budget is about $800 billion, so this is less than 10 percent of defense spending. You can also pick your favorite spending category, Google, and compare: About 11 years of U.S. spending on Christmas trees. About 2/3 of what we spend on "beauty and personal care." And so on.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:55 AM on October 10 [6 favorites]

To be fair, if we end up using any of these weapons, there may not be anyone left to have to pay the bill.

Call it a (radioactive) silver lining.

Apologies for the gallows humor. Please carry on.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:13 PM on October 10 [5 favorites]

why don't we just give every person in america 1 kajillion buckeroos
posted by Phssthpok at 12:19 PM on October 10 [14 favorites]

I believe we could end homelessness twice over, every year, into perpetuity for that kind of money. It is nuts.
posted by pdoege at 12:25 PM on October 10 [11 favorites]

Another way to say this is the government could hire 525,600 employees at a decent salary of 108K/yr and keep them employed through retirement.

How do you measure a year in the budget?
posted by Jon_Evil at 12:39 PM on October 10 [8 favorites]

Wish that effort and resource went into nuclear power. This money just feels so wasted, such an immense dedication to building something nobody wants to use and ideally is never used. Testing this shit is also devastating, we are not on a planet with the kind of climate where we can be goofing around playing with nukes just in case.
posted by GoblinHoney at 12:42 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]

What an utter waste.
posted by 3.2.3 at 1:28 PM on October 10 [7 favorites]

We could also provide permanent housing and basic services for the next 20 years for over one and half million people.

Something, something better spent something.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 1:44 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]

...$1 billlion is $3 per person, so that's about $170 per person, per year.

So maybe I don't WANT to spend my yearly $170 producing nukes. Maybe I'd rather spend it feeding children or funding libraries. Fuck the fucking military.
posted by BlueHorse at 1:53 PM on October 10 [11 favorites]

Every red cent spend on this is a waste of money. Dear god, just lie and say you brought nukes, then end homelessness and poverty with the money.
posted by The River Ivel at 1:57 PM on October 10 [16 favorites]

Worth every fucking penny.
posted by mr_roboto at 2:02 PM on October 10 [3 favorites]

We haven't had a world war since nukes became part of the equation, so I'm not entirely upset that we are maintaining what is essentially conflict-disincentivizing infrastructure.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:11 PM on October 10 [6 favorites]

I'm sympathetic to the idea that this isn't a massive chunk of the current defense budget, so the headline isn't very good. And I would prefer America spent money on being responsible with its arsenal rather than, like some other countries, playing it fast and loose.

But I also agree with the idea that, if it's an either-or proposition, we'd be better off funding education like nuclear arms and nuclear arms like education than the other way around. Sadly it doesn't work that way, and the problem of funding for education or homelessness is mostly a question of political will that doesn't make it possible to just cleanly swap one for the other. The US could both maintain its arsenal AND end poverty if it wanted to but it doesn't.
posted by axiom at 2:29 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]

>So spending one Manhattan Project per year does not even seem that outrageous

not sure if that was just taking the piss but the Manhattan Project funded three entire sites: Hanford (Plutonium production), Oak Ridge (with three separate approaches for enrichment), and Los Alamos.

The first a-bomb we dropped was overkill so I don't really see the point or at least wisdom of this .

ah, reading TFA I see it's about modernizing the triad, not just the bombs. I'm OK with that I guess.

>the government could hire 525,600 employees at a decent salary of 108K/yr and keep them employed through retirement

This is pretty much what is happening with the money?? he asks hopefully
posted by torokunai at 2:37 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]

Anytime articles do the “cost over (insert multi decade time span)” you’re being conned. 60 billion a year is under 10% of the US military budget. If you want to condemn that budget, you have a case, but nuclear weapons ain’t what’s driving it.

God I wish the “paper of record” wasn’t so entirely stupid on a whole range of things.
posted by Galvanic at 2:39 PM on October 10 [5 favorites]

axiom: "I'm sympathetic to the idea that this isn't a massive chunk of the current defense budget, so the headline isn't very good."

Maybe we can spend like a tenth of this on, I don't know, education? Shoring up Social Security? Infrastructure? Federal funding for biomedical research?

Building more bombs is pretty goddamn stupid. The fact that this ridiculous amount of money is an insignificant part of the total defense budget? The defense budget itself is inexcusable. Every other federal agency is in austerity mode but they get to waste billions per year on bombs we never plan to use. There is so much waste there.
posted by caution live frogs at 2:55 PM on October 10 [4 favorites]

We haven't had a world war since nukes became part of the equation,

I mean, if you ignore all of the hot spots of the Cold War, or discount the evolution of tactics on the guerrilla/terrorist and disinformation end of things, or the connections between the conflict in Ukraine and foreign (eg. Russian mercenary and other) involvement in various conflicts in Africa, or any wider impacts of Middle East conflict. And that’s before we get into the questionable reasoning of attributing that to nukes and not the United Nations, or having only two and then only one hegemonic global empire for the entire time since then instead of the multipolar power struggles that led to previous world wars.
posted by eviemath at 2:57 PM on October 10 [11 favorites]

So maybe I don't WANT to spend my yearly $170 producing nukes. Maybe I'd rather spend it feeding children or funding libraries.
Your money does feed children and funds libraries (and a bunch of other stuff).
posted by davidmsc at 3:09 PM on October 10 [5 favorites]

If we have this arsenal, it needs to be maintained so that we know - and other countries know - that it WILL work. We know our weapons work and can be delivered on target as expected. I don’t think Russia has that kind of confidence in their own weapons at the moment. Vladimir keeps rattling the nuclear saber, and who knows, there’s a chance he decides to say “fuck it” and launch one day. But he knows full well that if he does, the US counter strike will be far, far stronger. I hate that we’re at this point of needing to keep nukes in the first place, but that genie is out of the bottle.

People in this thread are railing against the cost, and it is true that we could do wonderful things with that money. You know what else could fund social programs that help the people of the country? Raising taxes on the fucking rich, especially considering they had their chance to prove that tax cuts would mean prosperity for everyone. That has been proven indisputably false. They didn’t hold up their end of the bargain, so it’s time to soak ‘em.
posted by azpenguin at 4:00 PM on October 10 [9 favorites]

Cheap at twice the price. Do we need five thousand warheads? Probably not: a couple of hundred would be just as effective.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:16 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]

I mean, we built these weapons to defeat communism, so technically it's not money that could instead be spent housing the homeless, it's money invested to prevent the housing of the homeless on a global scale!
posted by stet at 5:56 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]

60 billion a year is under 10% of the US military budget

And how much is the military budget compared with the domestic budget? If you're going to say this is nothing, or that we need perspective, then at least point out how this means we don't have those billions to spend on, say, providing healthcare or clean water, or fighting climate change. All of which are public needs that are arguably much more pressing than adding to an arsenal already loaded with an obscene number of nuclear weapons.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:01 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]

The US government spent a little over six trillion dollars in FY 2023.

Of that, about $1.3T was social security, $850B medicare, and $824B on health-related programs. $798B was spent on national defense, which includes defense-related DoE spending (I checked!).

$60B a year is a lot of money. It's close to a full 1% of the federal budget, and that is sincerely a huge amount of money.

I agree -- to a point -- with the people who argue the nuclear deterrent is cheap in terms of its impact on global security. I strongly think that letting the nuclear deterrent slowly degrade would be a huge risk for the US. I am probably more in favor of spending this money than not.

But the existence of nuclear weapons is also one of the reasons that security is such a fraught problem, and the existence of the US nuclear weapons program is at least one of the reasons the rest of the world chased them so urgently. Ongoing spending on these weapons is just a way to mitigate a problem we largely caused.

What upsets me isn't nuclear modernization programs per se. It is the complete lack of interest that the US government shows in arms control, nuclear drawdown, or negotiating with other nuclear powers to make this balance of terror less terrifying.
posted by learning from frequent failure at 6:22 PM on October 10 [5 favorites]

It is the complete lack of interest that the US government shows in arms control, nuclear drawdown...

Not actually true: more than 2/3 of the total number of warheads (roughly split between the USA and Russia) have been retired over the last thirty years. This nuclear drawdown was done via negotiating with other nuclear powers. We would be just as safe if both countries got rid of 2/3 of the remaining warheads, that's true, but the facts do not support your conclusion.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:38 PM on October 10 [9 favorites]

Wish that effort and resource went into nuclear power.

If it went into solar PV and batteries instead, it would have somewhere between three and ten times the carbon emissions abatement potential depending whose numbers you find most credible.
posted by flabdablet at 6:52 PM on October 10 [7 favorites]

The US and Russia have dramatically reduced their arsenals. It makes sense for both sides - less to maintain and still more than enough to rain hell on each other. Here’s one example - B-52 bombers destroyed to comply with nuclear arms reduction treaties

The satellite view here is not far at all from me. You see a bunch of B-52s chopped to pieces. These were scrapped as part of arms reduction treaties, and they’re left there like that so the Russians are able to verify the destruction of the airframes via satellite.

Another reason that it makes sense to reduce arsenals is the advancement in weapons tech. The US used to have a lot of multi-megaton nukes ready to go at a moment’s notice. The Titan 2, which was deployed in several areas (including 18 around my city) carried a 9 megaton warhead. Nowadays only the B83 gravity bomb can yield over a megaton, and most warheads are in the 80-475 KT range. The reason is simple - accuracy. When your missiles are accurate to within a mile and a half, there’s a very good chance you won’t hit what you’re aiming for and you make up for that lack of accuracy with a bigger kaboom. Modernizing the triad means fewer warheads needed and you also don’t have to throw 5-10 MT at every target.

Again, don’t take this to mean I’m a fan of nuclear weapons. I’m not in the least. But reality is what it is.
posted by azpenguin at 9:12 PM on October 10 [4 favorites]

>three and ten times the carbon emissions abatement potential

abatement potential of ICBMs is pretty good if you ask me
posted by torokunai at 9:30 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]

As long as we have for-profit defense contractors and arms manufacturers, we are going to keep pushing the world towards violence. Add to that a constant parade of people trained to see the world in terms of winners and losers and you have the sort of blinkered thinking we keep reading about in the news. Despite 9/11, the desire of the rest of the world to invade our *separate entire continent* (assuming no threat from Canada and Mexico) is totally unproven. Most of the antipathy towards the US is because of:

* Our huge number of military bases everywhere
* Our constant thwarting of the will of the majority at the UN
* Our constant meddling in affairs that are not ours
* Our transparent use of military might to strongarm countries into favoring our corporations
* Our viewing of a small attack on any military personnel or base around the world as an affront to our honor.

This could go on forever, and it will. Sure, maintain the nukes so they don't become a danger. But these are the questions I want answered:

* How can we reduce the export of arms and military services to zero over time?
* How can we reduce our "big brother" military presence around the world?
* How can we reform the UN and alliances so that any military action is a joint decision and done only when necessary?
* How can we get back to a Congressional declaration of war as a requirement for US troops doing anything offensive anywhere?
* DoD is ~$900 billion and State Dept. is $90 billion. Why isn't it the opposite?
* How can we project a positive vision of our country around the world with nonprofit public works, aid, and knowledge?
* How can we dismantle the CIA and pledge to stop engaging in covert operations, disinformation, and the like? We can replace the CIA with a pure info-gathering group.
* How can we redirect the huge and efficient organization that is the US military to perform important non-military services for our country?

There will always be situations like Ukraine that require tough choices and international cooperation, but as for the idea that the US needs a giant worldwide military force, nukes, and constant private tech innovation to "protect democracy and spread freedom", I mean ... citation needed. Iraq 1, Iraq 2, Afghanistan, Vietnam, various other crap - those were all TOTAL BULLSHIT and a waste of our time.

All this seems totally obvious to me after 55 years as an American, but I'm sure it would have 95% opposition in the citizenry. We've brainwashed ourselves.
posted by caviar2d2 at 7:11 AM on October 11 [7 favorites]

> >the government could hire 525,600 employees at a decent salary of 108K/yr and keep them employed through retirement

That's functionally what this is doing. Probably not quite that many employees, because I suspect a fair bit of the money gets spent on expensive raw materials, but a lot of it does end up getting spent on skilled labor and is effectively a Keynesian stimulus to a bunch of rural Zip codes.

Some of it will doubtless be truly wasted in that it'll go to profits of publicly-traded defense contractors and end up going to their investors, but the nuclear weapons space contains a surprising number of employee-owned, not-for-profit, and sort of quasi-governmental entities that don't have direct investors. So I guess that's a plus.

Personally, I think nuclear deterrence is a valid and important mission in a world where other states have nuclear weapons. Unilateral disarmament would be stupid when the Russians and Chinese and Israelis and pretty soon the Iranians all have their own weapons. The reason nukes don't get thrown around is because nobody wants to see mushroom clouds growing over their own cities, not because of some deep philosophical agreement. So the ability to blast anyplace on the planet to cinders is, at least for the moment, a rather important part of making sure places on the planet don't get blasted to cinders.

But it does feel like we're overpaying for that ability.

I've been unclear for a while on exactly why we're maintaining the land-based ICBM fleet, for instance. The UK has maintained a submarine-only deterrence program for decades, including during the Cold War, and it seemed to keep the Soviets out of Scotland pretty handily. If it's necessary to let the Air Force maintain some part of the "triad" for internal political reasons, then—since we need bombers for their conventional role anyway—let them keep that part. The B-52 is already on track to see it's 100th birthday, and it's nuclear-capable, so: box checked. But the ICBMs just don't seem especially useful when you have SLBMs and air-launched standoff cruise missiles. (If we really need a land-based nuclear force, bring back the GLCM and let the Army get back in on the steely-eyed-missile-man fun. They were comparatively cheap, being just a couple of Tomahawks on a vehicle chassis.)

The only reason I can see for keeping the big megaton-class weapons around, and their associated launch systems, is asteroid defense. And I don't think an ICBM would be super useful there anyway, because they're designed with just enough thrust to toss the weapon over to the other size of the planet, not put it in orbit, and certainly not give it Earth escape velocity. So an asteroid defense platform would really need to involve integration of a weapon on an actual space-launch system (some of which are admittedly missile derivatives, which might make it easier), not on a silo-based missile.

Anyway, that would be my proposal: eliminate the silos, let the Navy keep the SLBMs (which the UK helps pay for a bit), the Air Force keeps the ALCMs and maybe bunker-busters, the national labs work towards a unified, variable-yield, long-life physics package, and spend some of the savings on an asteroid-defense mission. Use the spare plutonium from the retired weapons on small nuclear reactors (which would be basically submarine reactors in a box). That should be enough to keep the services happy, the big defense contractors happy, and a bunch of cool old missile silos come on the market, so HGTV should even be in our corner. Easy peasy.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:47 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]

Nobel Peace Prize Is Awarded to Japanese Group of Atomic Bomb Survivors

Nihon Hidankyo is a grass-roots movement of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The group’s efforts have helped establish a “nuclear taboo,” the Nobel committee said.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:14 AM on October 11 [3 favorites]

caviar2d2, I agree with everything you've written except the last sentence.

We've brainwashed ourselves.
No, we've been brainwashed by people with money and power who desire more money and power. We elected them. We'll continue to elect them because our political system is presented strictly as entertainment to amuse and distract us--handwaving.
Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.
posted by BlueHorse at 11:51 AM on October 11

I've been unclear for a while on exactly why we're maintaining the land-based ICBM fleet, for instance. The UK has maintained a submarine-only deterrence program for decades, including during the Cold War, and it seemed to keep the Soviets out of Scotland pretty handily

One rationale is that future technologies are not easily predicted. Something in the future could make submarine-based platforms more easily detectable and vulnerable, and you don't want to overcommit to whatever leg of the triad seems strongest at the time.

Another rationale is that the ICBM silos are the most "ready" part of the triad, in a command-and-control sense. Even in a surprise attack with low warning time, it is harder for an adversary to imagine being able to decapitate C&C before a land-based retaliatory strike is launched. There are ways to increase submarine and air readiness, but they come with costs (having to commit to more subs out at sea at once, having aircraft pre-loaded with ordinance on ready alert, etc.). Doing so also limits the number of options the US has to proportionally respond to an escalation in nuclear threats (remember the DEFCON scale? It's like being at DEFCON 3 all the time instead of the baseline being 5).

Another rationale relates to maintaining overall mutual deterrence. Land-based ICBMs are easily observable. Submarine and, to some extent, air-based platforms are designed to be low-observable and stealthy. If the US shifted a huge percentage of its nuclear capability to the submarine fleet, an adversary might have greater fear of a surprise attack, and behave more aggressively themselves. Similar rationale was behind negotiations between the US and the Soviets at various points to limit the deployment of technologies to shoot down incoming ICBMs, over fears that one side or the other might gain an overriding strategic advantage.

The UK is a good example of sub-only deterrence, but I would say that the main adversary, Russia, probably doesn't think of the UK's force as separate from the US's deterrence capability.
posted by AndrewInDC at 11:53 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]

It's a make work program for contractors. It's going to keep a lot of Americans buying overpriced housing for a long time.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:49 PM on October 11

She Was 19 When the Atomic Bomb Dropped

Akiko Takakura survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This is her story, in her voice.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:24 PM on October 11 [1 favorite]