Something for Everybody

With defense cuts looming, the exact cost of our strategic nuclear offensive forces has become a hotly debated topic. There is a wide range of disagreement as to what should qualify as a related expenditure. This debate stems around the idea that:

Fewer nuclear weapons presumably mean less spending, but no one can say how much less, in part because there is no definitive estimate of current nuclear weapons spending. Official estimates tend to be narrowly defined. Unofficial estimates capture more costs, but with less detail and authority.

In our newest report, Resolving Ambiguity: Costing Nuclear Weapons, we take seventy pages to help elucidate what has previously been less and less clear. Our bottom up estimate is fully detailed, but we also have something for those looking “to ease some of the confusion surrounding the issue” without the full length seventy page read. BFAD wrote a more succinct and accessible summary of the report that is well below seventy pages in Arms Control Today.