How the U.S. can start creating jobs, start by eliminating Nuclear weapons

The Cost of Nuclear Weapons

The Costs of nuclear weapons programs is enormous and for every dollar invested in advanced weapon systems a dollar less is invested in health, education, social welfare and development.

It has been argued that nuclear weapons are cost-effective because they provided more explosive power than conventional weapons. Today that is not completely true. We have extremely powerful and advanced conventional weapons today as it was demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq. The argument leaves out of consideration whether the extreme explosive power of a nuclear weapon is really needed. It leaves out of consideration the immense destruction of society and the environment and the unjustifiable loss of civilian lives.

The US has spent more than 5.5 trillion $ in developing their nuclear arsenal and France has spent about 1.5 trillion $. ­ And these numbers do not include the costs of testing, fissile material production, storage and disposal. The costs for other nuclear weapon states are probably similar, but those numbers are not publicly available.

To put this into perspective the price of global elimination of starvation, provision of health care, provision of shelter and clean water, elimination of illiteracy, provision of sustainable energy, debt relief for developing countries, clearance of landmines and more has been estimated to be about 260 billion $ annually for 10 years.

The costs of disarmament can be very high as well and some nuclear weapon states, like Russia, find it hard to meet the costs to disarm, dismantle and dispose of nuclear weapons. However there is no doubt that in the long run it will be more cost-efficient to disarm globally than to maintain current nuclear arsenals. It costs a lot of money to simply store, transport and maintain nuclear weapons. It costs much more to develop new weapons ­ and as long as nuclear weapons exist, history has showed that new weapons will be developed.