On the eve of destruction

Command & Control, the extraordinary book by Eric Schlosser, describing how lucky we have been regarding nukes given the incredible number of near misses we have had in the art of blowing ourselves up, resonates, in part, to the articulate Richard Rhodes piece On the Eve of Destruction discussing the ongoing insanity of an out of control tech capable of ending civilization as we know it.

The hydrogen bomb’s arbitrary destructiveness follows from its harnessing of light-element fusion. A fission weapon requires a certain critical mass of fissile material for its chain reaction to continue, limiting its yield as the heating mass expands and blows itself apart: the largest fission weapon the United States ever tested yielded about half a megaton. In contrast, a thermonuclear weapon, as its name implies, can be made arbitrarily large simply by adding more hydrogen fuel, like building a fire. The largest hydrogen bomb the United States ever tested yielded about fifteen megatons, or about one thousand Hiroshimas. The Soviet Union tested a weapon with a design yield of one hundred megatons that was modified to constrain its yield to only fifty-eight megatons so that it could be dropped by air over northern Siberia without presumably destroying the plane. The Hungarian émigré physicist Edward Teller once sketched out a weapon of a ten thousand megaton yield but realized that at around one hundred megatons the fireball from the explosion would be ten miles in diameter, which is approximately the thickness of the Earth’s troposphere. More than a hundred megatons and the blast would likely blow out into space rather than extending destruction on the ground.

And ... it's all about the money

In 2008 the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit founded by former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn and media titan Ted Turner, released a study indicating that from 1940 to 1996, the United States spent at least $5.5 trillion (or $6.9 trillion in today’s dollars) on its nuclear weapons program. If you include the costs of cleaning up production wastes and disposing of surplus materials, that number increases to $5.8 trillion ($7.3 trillion). The bombs and warheads themselves cost only about 7 percent of that number; the remainder comprised the costs of delivery, command, control, communications and intelligence systems, as well as defense systems including air defense, missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, and civil defense. These expenditures constituted 29 percent of all U.S. military spending and almost 11 percent of all government spending from 1940 through 1996, exceeding all other categories of government spending except non-nuclear national defense and Social Security.

Divided equally among the entire U.S. population, $5.8 trillion equals slightly more than $17,000 per person. That’s one way to visualize the cost of building and maintaining our nuclear arsenal. Another way is to ask what that $5.8 trillion might have bought instead. Since the dollars come out of different baskets, the comparison is somewhat one of apples and oranges. But it’s a comparison President Dwight D. Eisenhower made in one of his first presidential addresses, twelve weeks into his presidency:

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.

 

Questions, questions in terms of why we need these weapons in the first place.

But what enemy or enemies are we defending ourselves against? Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, back in 1991 when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, famously remarked, “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” What are we down to today? An Iran with only a conventional military, increasingly crippled by sanctions and unwilling to engage? North Korea now protected by an arsenal of nuclear weapons—twenty or more, including its first hydrogen bomb—and holding Japan and South Korea hostage, to be sacrificed if we were so foolish as to attack? China, which has limited its nuclear arsenal to a posture of minimum deterrence since it first acquired a nuclear capability in 1964? What in heaven’s name is a trillion dollars in defense spending for?

Good question indeed.