March 17, 2014

REPORT: $1 TRILLION PRICE TAG FOR NUCLEAR DETERRENT OVER NEXT 30 YEARS

By ExchangeMonitor

It could cost more than $1 trillion to maintain and modernize the nation’s nuclear deterrent over the next 30 years, according to a new report released yesterday by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The report, “Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad: US Strategic Modernization over the Next Thirty Years,” is among the first efforts by the arms control community to estimate the 30-year cost of the nation’s nuclear deterrent. The report is based largely on the government’s own modernization estimates, and raises questions about potential “sticker shock” as the costs of modernizing the deterrent rises dramatically over the next three decades, which the report’s authors say is likely to be a problem no matter what side of the arms control debate one is on. “This is a balloon rate mortgage,” Jon Wolfsthal, the deputy director of CNS and a former nuclear advisor to Vice President Joseph Biden, said yesterday at an event unveiling the report. “We are being sold a set of programs which may very much be in the national interest. This is not a debate about whether we need nuclear weapons or not, whether we are going to need more or less. This is simply saying these are going to cost much more than people appreciate they are going to cost.”

According to the report, spending on the nation’s nuclear deterrent could peak in the late 2020s as efforts to build new long-range strategic bombers, nuclear submarines, a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and modernize the weapons complex converge. Spending over the next 30 years, for instance, could reach $350 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the report suggests. It could also cost as much as $100 billion for 100 new long-range bombers, between $20 and $120 billion for a new ICBM fleet, and $102 billion for new submarines. “Whether you think we need to maintain a very large nuclear arsenal and that this trillion dollars is well spent or whether you think we can get by with fewer nuclear weapons and this money would be well spent elsewhere, everybody should know what the number is,” Wolfsthal said. “If it turns out it costs this much and the American public and the Congress don’t appreciate it and aren’t prepared for it, they will not fund it.”

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