Reply #3: In particular, nuclear power and weapons have served to concentrate power and wealth.

[Octafish]

Nuclear power and weapons are most un-democratic, yet it seems like no one in Corporate McPravda talks about it.

US nuclear tab at $5.8 trillion

Washington: In an enormous drain on resources the United States has spent $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons according to a new study

South News July 1

A four-year study of newly declassified Pentagon documents, released yesterday by the Brookings Institute, looked at the expenditures of producing and deploying nuclear explosives over the past 5 1/2 decades with current spending on the arsenal at about $35 billion annually, or roughly 15 percent of the total defense budget.

Since the birth of the atomic weapons program in 1940, a total of $5.5 trillion was spent through 1996, the Washington think tank reports. That is 29 percent of all U.S. military spending and almost 11 percent of all government spending through the 52 years.

In the first comprehensive audit of the US nuclear arsenal,it calculated costs for research, development, deployment, command and control, defenses and dismantlement. The U.S. government has never attempted to track these costs, and whether the weapons helped to bring down the Soviet Union, against whom most of the arms were aimed after World War II, remains an open question, Stephen I. Schwartz, chairman of the four-year study, said in the report.

"Given the significant sums expended on nuclear weapons and their central role in the cold war, it is striking that so few have expressed an interest in either the cumulative or the annual costs,'' Schwartz wrote.

SNIP...

Highlights of the report:

• The United States produced 70,000 nuclear warheads between 1945 and 1990, with an arsenal that peaked in the 1960s at 32,000 warheads
• Making the warheads was relatively inexpensive. Firing, storing and handling them was extremely costly. The 70,000 warheads cost $409.4 billion, only about 7 percent of the total. But thousands of aircraft, submarines, ships, missiles, and a large network of factories, bases and personnel cost $3.241 trillion.
• In 1996 dollars, the World War II Manhattan Project cost more than $26 billion.
• The United States has produced 65 warhead types for 116 different weapons systems.
• Thirteen major U.S. facilities - including Washington state's Bangor submarine base - handle and maintain nuclear weapons, and cover an area larger than Delaware, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia combined.
• Some 6,135 strategic ballistic missiles were purchased at a cost of $266 billion, as well as 4,680 strategic bombers since World War II at a cost of $227 billion.
• The 2,975 submarine-launched ballistic missiles alone cost $97 billion, said the report. Since their inception, the United States has designed and deployed 14 kinds of strategic bombers. Some 210 nuclear-powered military vessels have been built or are being built.
• The figures include the estimated $7 billion costs of attempting to develop a nuclear-powered airplane, which never got off the ground.
• At the moment, the U.S. nuclear arsenal - long-range strategic and short-range tactical - is estimated at 10,635 warheads.
• The current stockpile has the equivalent explosive force of about 120,000 Hiroshima bombs.
• The United States is spending an estimated $35 billion a year on nuclear weapons and related programs, the Brookings Institution says in a massive study.

CONTINUED...


http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/southnews/980701-USnukes.htm

Thank you, Bozita, for caring about the issue.