Cost
The designing, testing, producing, deploying, and defending against nuclear weapons is one of the largest expenditures for the nations which possess nuclear weapons. In the United States during the Cold War years, between "one quarter to one third of all military spending since World War II devoted to nuclear weapons and their infrastructure." According to a retrospective Brookings Institute study published in 1998 by the Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Committee (formed in 1993 by the W. Alton Jones Foundation), the total expenditures for U.S. nuclear weapons from 1940 to 1998 was $5.5 trillion in 1996 Dollars. The total public debt at the end of fiscal year 1998 was $5,478,189,000,000 in 1998 Dollars or $5.3 trillion in 1996 Dollars. The entire public debt in 1998 was therefore attributable to the research, development, and deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons-related programs during the Cold War.
Read more about this topic: History Of Nuclear Weapons
Famous quotes containing the word cost:
“Each is under the most sacred obligation not to squander the material committed to him, not to sap his strength in folly and vice, and to see at the least that he delivers a product worthy the labor and cost which have been expended on him.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”; and since then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)