Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order by Shampa Biswas

Author:Shampa Biswas [Biswas, Shampa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL011000 Political Science / International Relations / General
ISBN: 9780816680986
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2014-08-31T18:30:00+00:00

Nuclear Weapons Costs: Current, Future, and Forgone

That nuclear weapons are costly would be an uncontroversial point to make. But even the most basic estimates of the costs of investing in nuclear weapons are quite complicated to establish, partly because of the many different dimensions of these costs, as enumerated further later (Bailey 1994), but also because of the odd character of the nuclear market (Kaldor 1982). Pointing to the inefficiencies of weapons production in the absence of an open market for the determination of value, Kaldor argues that it is collusion between the state and arms manufacturers that determines the utility of nuclear weapons, so that technological improvement entails enhancing the utility of the product to the customer (i.e., the state) rather than cheapening it. Utility determined through such collusion leads to ever-increasing dedication of resources to weapons production, even when the products may decrease actual utility as far as security is concerned, that is, weapons that require more maintenance, create more vulnerability, or endlessly enhance overkill capacity.7 Most important, because these weapons don’t reenter the production process, their entire costs, which include the costs of production and the mark-ups in sale, are a deduction from the surplus value earned elsewhere in the economy (Kaldor 1982, 270–74).8 What this means, then, is that the costs of nuclear investment require attention not just to the resources dedicated to producing and maintaining the weapons but also some estimate of what alternative “use” could be made of this deduction from surplus value (i.e., opportunity costs) if it were not invested in the production of what may be considered “use-less” weapons. This section attempts to provide some estimates for both these kinds of costs.

Despite the difficulties of gathering sensitive data in an extremely protected industry, some attempts have been made to calculate the enormous costs of nuclear weapons, which give a sense of the enormity of expenditures as well as the multifaceted nature of such expenditures. At the global level, a recent report released by an arm of the World Security Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank that emerged from the Center for Defense Information and that is headed by nuclear weapons specialist Bruce Blair, found that world spending on nuclear weapons has surpassed $1 trillion per decade (Blair and Brown 2011). According to this report, in 2010, a total $91 billion was spent on nuclear weapons globally, and 2011 had an estimated cost of $104 billion. The United States continues to spend the largest amount, spending $55.6 billion on nuclear weapons in 2010 and having been expected to spend $61.3 billion in 2011. Despite the shrinking nuclear arsenal that gets much attention every time a treaty such as the recent New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is successfully negotiated and ratified, the report indicates that the United States plans to increase its investment in nuclear weapons infrastructure by 21 percent, at a cost of $85 billion over the next decade, and to spend an additional $100 billion on upgrading strategic nuclear forces during this period.

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