The Staggering Price You're Paying for America's Nuclear Makeover

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/10/opinion/nuclear-weapons-us-price.html?unlocked_article_code=1.R04.5uwM.Gx1d5MAlscEM&smid=url-share

With Russia at war, China escalating regional disputes and nations like North Korea and Iran expanding their nuclear programs, the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its own arsenal. The spending spree, which the government began planning in 2010, is underway in at least 23 states — nearly 50 if you include subcontractors. It follows a decades-long freeze on designing, building or testing new nuclear weapons. Along with the subs, the military is paying for a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles and thermonuclear warheads. Tally all that spending, and the bill comes to almost $57 billion a year, or $108,000 per minute for three decades.

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Times Opinion spent six months traveling to cities and towns around the nation to discover how this modern Manhattan Project is coming together, interviewing more than 100 residents, workers, community leaders and federal officials. The portrait that emerged is a country that is being transformed — physically, financially and philosophically — by an unprecedented wave of nuclear revitalization. The effort is as flush with cash as it is rife with problems and delays: At least 20 major projects are already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

If you don’t live where the submarines are welded or the missile silos are dug, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t know it’s happening. The federal government has said little about the plan in public, outside of congressional hearings and strategy papers, or the vast amount being spent. There has been no significant debate. The billion-dollar programs move under the radar. At a time when funding for politicized issues such as climate change, foreign military aid and border security are under a microscope, this issue miraculously appears to have sidestepped the crossfire.

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We should talk about why Washington is making America nuclear again and what we hope to achieve with one of the most ambitious, far-reaching construction projects in the country’s history. The money is already flowing, assembling weapons everyone hopes will never be used.

[jalan48]

1. K & R

"There's plenty of money to be made, by supplying the Army with tools of the trade".
Country Joe McDonald