Billions for Bombs (Page 1 of 2)

Earlier this year, a letter arrived from Pleasant Hill, Tenn. It was a year-end summary/Christmas greeting from Walter and Dorothy Stark. Walter turned 85 last April; Dorothy finished her eighth decade in July. It was a nice, newsy letter of reunions and the ache and pains of old age.

It didn’t wrap up like a typical family chat letter, though. It ended with a plea to friends and family to weigh in on the idea of a new bomb plant in Oak Ridge. Just above the “With our warmest greetings” line was this closing sentence: "Our voices together can hasten the day when nations will feed, educate and heal with the billions now being spent on death and destruction.”

Walter’s letter made me think of Dwight Eisenhower because the two men have something important in common.

They have plenty in uncommon, too. While Eisenhower was directing the troops in the European theatre during the second world war, Walter was doing time in a federal penitentiary as a conscientious objector. While Eisenhower was rising to the height of power, moving his furniture into the federal mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue, Walter was finishing seminary, a classmate of Martin Luther King, Jr.

But in the end, the old soldier Ike grew wise—as wise as Walter had been all along. “Every gun that is made,” Eisenhower said in a 1953 speech, “every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world-in-arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in its true sense; it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Ike had also developed some political horse sense after two terms in the White House. “The people of the world genuinely want peace,” he said. “Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.”

That day has not yet arrived. What politicians give us instead is the war machine. It appears that Ike was a prophet in the Old Testament sense—he was interpreting his times, not predicting the future. The die was already cast, and since 1959, it has become hardened.

Twelve years ago, the folks at the Brookings Institution decided to figure out how much we were spending on nuclear weapons. They hired a smart young fellow, Stephen Schwartz, to crunch the numbers. Schwartz’s first discovery was remarkable: He interviewed staffers for Congressional committees responsible for budget decisions and found that no one could tell him what nuclear weapons were costing the nation each year.

He did some more digging (and this was back when digging required a shovel, not a keyboard peck on Google!) and discovered that no one had ever made an attempt to calculate the cost of nuclear weapons—no price tag, classified or unclassified, had ever been pinned on the Bomb.

It took a long time, a host of experts, and a lot of Excedrin, but Brookings finally published Atomic Audit in 1998. The foreword begins, “This book assembles for the first time anywhere the actual and estimated costs of the U.S. nuclear weapons program since its inception in 1940.”

Total price tag, not counting the cost of projected waste and clean-up operations: $5.5 trillion in 1998. That cost was rising at a rate of $35 billion a year then; it has gone up since, pushing the total price tag now upwards of $6 trillion.

Ironies abound. In theory, these weapons assure our security. Yet in the 60 years since Hiroshima, the moments of greatest danger to our national security have revolved around these weapons—think Cuban missile crisis. In theory, the Bomb is the ultimate military weapon, yet since Hiroshima the U.S. has engaged in several wars and has not used nuclear weapons even when we lost. In theory, these weapons protect us, yet in the last six decades the production and testing of nuclear weapons have poisoned hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens—workers at bomb plants, victims of testing fall-out, subjects of government-sponsored experiments in mental institutions and hospitals around the country.