Nuclear Summer from bookish, a weblog by George Girton

Nuclear Summer . . . . . aug 5 2003 — bookish90.dat

You know, sometimes you just can't sleep, what with bills and what's in the daily newspaper. Speaking of which, Monday's Los Angeles Times brought news of Iran's burgeoning nuclear capability. And in Sunday's Times Robert Del Tredici reviewed Paul Shambroom's book of photographs of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In the review he cited an audit of the cost of nuclear weapons conducted by Brookings Institution scholar Stephen I Schwartz.

That's the bill I was thinking about: 5.8 trillion dollars from 1940 through 1996. Aside from being incredible, is that plausible? Since it's a 56-year period the math is pretty easy: an average of .103571428 trillion a year, or about a hundred three and a half billion a year ($103,571,428,000). Still not too easily grasped. Say we divide it by roughly the number of public schools in the U.S., about 100,000. Now we come up with a much more manageable figure: $1,035,714 per year for each school in the U.S. No wonder educators are by and large opposed to nuclear weapons.

That seems like an awful lot for just warheads — it must include development and delivery system costs too. No wonder I can't afford books. As a taxpayer I've spent way too much on nuclear weapons. And it even turns out they're the wrong kind of nuclear weapons for the needs of today's modern army, but that's another story. I'm going back to bed: Here are a couple of books for my amazon wishlist: Face to Face with the Bomb: Nuclear Reality after the Cold War [buy at amazon] . by Paul Shambroom, and At Work in the Fields of the Bomb [buy at amazon] . by Robert Del Tredici. If you get me these books, I'll promise to write a novel that will keep you awake all night long.

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