Appendix D: Assessing the Costs of Other Nuclear Weapon States

The preceding discussion raises the obvious question of whether an analysis similar to the one presented in this volume might be undertaken in other countries that have produced or deployed nuclear weapons. The answer is yes, but with varying degrees of difficulty.¹ Indeed one purpose of the current study is to encourage similar efforts for the other nuclear powers. With the exception of Russia, the significantly smaller size of these arsenals should ease the sizable data collection requirements of the present effort. The clearest candidate for such an assessment is the former Soviet Union. Unfortunately it is also the one least likely to yield anything approaching the level of detail in this book. The central problem is that the political and heavily militarized economic system of the USSR provided "no way to accurately measure these costs," even throughout Soviet history, the issue of defense spending was at the heart of civilian-military relations:

Detailed discussions by Soviet leaders on the trade-offs between civilian and military spending or the burden imposed by the military on the economy as a whole were simply not possible....Because of the fundamental belief that it was immoral and unpatriotic to question the absolute priority of the motherland, the very idea of calculating the costs of defense was implicitly suspect. As a result, much of the data relating to defense industry were not even collected, and when they were, they were not shared with civilian planners and policy makers.²

Such conditions make it exceedingly difficult if not impossible to comprehend the total historical and current costs of the Soviet/Russian nuclear weapons program. Even the recent dramatic political changes in Russia apparently have not improved matters much. "What is notable is how little substantial new information has been obtained about the defense-industrial complex, even after the collapse of the Soviet government and the accession to power of the democrats in the Yeltsin government."³ And even if this should change, the fact that the Soviet Union was not a market economy and therefore lacked market prices means that measuring the true costs of any economic activity is essentially impossible.

One may nevertheless infer from the scale of the effort that costs were quite high, perhaps even roughly comparable to those in the United States in certain areas (for example, the production of fissile materials).⁴ At the same time, the near total lack of environmental concerns (as can be seen in the widespread practice of injecting high-level radioactive wastes directly into the ground or dumping fully fueled naval propulsion reactors at sea) would have reduced the cost of production but resulted in a potentially grave environmental legacy, which continues to have serious repercussions for the peoples of the former Soviet Union and, in the case of sea-based disposal, Norway (see Chapters 6 and 7). The use of slave or conscripted labor to construct many facilities and to mine uranium in the 1940s and 1950s also lowered monetary costs, but with a correspondingly high cost in human health. There is no doubt that the intangible environmental and human costs of nuclear weapons production in the former Soviet Union dwarf those of the United States, whose record in this regard is far from unblemished.

What about China, the only other nonmarket (until recently) nuclear power? Here there is even less certainty and practically no data. The small size and relatively slow pace of China's nuclear weapons program (it has an estimated 450 warheads and has conducted just 45 tests since 1964 versus 1,030 for the United States since 1945) would indicate a modest scale of effort, but it might also indicate production problems which would have the effect of increasing costs. Several hundred thousand people were reportedly involved in the production and testing China's first atomic bomb (1955-1964), a significantly larger work force than required for the Manhattan Project. To keep costs down, Chinese officials carefully studied everything that was known about the U.S., British and Soviet programs and proceeded with great caution. "They approved each move only after careful comparison to the ones already taken by other nations, with special attention paid to the American program," a policy characterized by one Chinese leader as "great and deliberate redundancy." The total cost of the effort has been estimated at about $28 billion, which was "about 37 percent of the entire state budget for...1957, and...slightly more than 100 percent of the defense budget for the two years 1957-58."⁵

Two factors caused delays and thus increased costs on the project. The first was Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward," which encouraged innovation and improvisation in the name of technological progress. At the gaseous diffusion plant under construction at Lanzhou, workers tampered with equipment and modified designs over the objections of their director. This resulted "in over 290 accidents, of which more than 20 were ranked as major." The director later recalled that this set work back six months. A second and far more serious setback was the Soviet Union's withdrawal from its nuclear cooperation agreements with China in July and August 1960, following a period of increased tension between the two countries (in part because the Soviet Union refused in June 1959 to provide China with the technical details or a working model of an atomic bomb). Without blueprints to construct their plant (which were held back by the Soviet Union apparently because they duplicated an enrichment facility in the Urals), the Chinese were left in the dark about how it was supposed to be built, let alone operated. In addition, all the remaining equipment at the site was deliberately left in a state of disarray, further complicating attempts to assemble it. Nevertheless, they undertook the effort and at the expense of an additional 700 days succeeded in producing just enough highly-enriched uranium to fuel the first atomic test in 1964. There are no other cost figures available for the Chinese nuclear weapons program.⁶

Little is known about the cost of the British program as well, although the unit cost of some weapons systems is available.⁷ The continuing restrictions under the Official Secrets Act make it difficult to ascertain costs in truly comprehensive way. As with China, the small size of Great Britain's arsenal (currently estimated at about 200 warheads) would appear to indicate that costs have been relatively low.

In early 1997 the secretary of state for defense provided the House of Commons with the operating cost of the four submarine Polaris fleet from 1981 through 1996 (this dropped to three in May 1992, and all the submarines were withdrawn from service by August 1996, to be eventually replaced by 2001 with an equal number of Vanguard class submarines carrying U.S.-built Trident II missiles).⁸ These figures indicate a total operating cost of roughly $7.0 billion since 1981, with annual costs in the 1980s running between $600-$780 million before steadily dropping during the 1990s to just over $100 million in 1995-1996. An additional $130 million is expected to be spent through 2007 to defuel and retire the submarines and scrap the Polaris missiles. The costs of reactor and reactor core disposal and the ultimate disposition of the nuclear warheads is not included in this total.⁹

The historical costs associated with the French nuclear arsenal are likewise murky, although some figures on weapons procurement and operating costs are available.¹⁰ Because the nuclear testing program was carried out entirely overseas (Algeria and Mururoa), U.S. experience suggests that expenditures for this activity would have been considerable. Among the smaller nuclear powers, France was also the only one to deploy a triad of intermediate-range ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and nuclear bombers (although China is moving slowly toward acquiring this capability), in addition to tactical nuclear weapons. On July 31, 1996, France retired its 15 remaining Mirage IVP nuclear bombers and on September 16, 1996 it shut down the eighteen-missile IRBM force in the Plateau d'Albion in southeastern France (which had been operational since 1971). The base will be completely dismantled and all the missiles and their 1-megaton warheads removed by 1998, at a cost of about $78 million. The future nuclear force will consist of forty-five Mirage 2000N nuclear strike fighters carrying the medium-range Air-Sol Moyenne Portée standoff missile and four ballistic missile submarines. Available data indicate that France's nuclear weapons budget consumed 3 percent of the defense budget in 1960, 18 percent in 1970, 14 percent in 1980, and 17 percent in 1990 (the reported nuclear share of the budget peaked in 1967 at 26 percent). More recently, actual expenditures dropped from about $6.9 billion (F35.8 billion) in 1990 to around $2.7 billion (F16.3 billion) in 1998 and now account for about 20 percent of weapon spending."¹¹

Finally, there is the case of South Africa, which from the 1960s through 1989 built six nuclear weapons (out of a planned program of seven; the seventh was half-finished) fueled by highly-enriched uranium before dismantling them by September 1991 as a prelude to rejoining the international community (and as a result of the increasing cost of the effort). The existence of the program was revealed by President F.W. de Klerk on March 24, 1993. This secret program employed about a thousand people, relied on minimal outside assistance (which increased both its cost and duration), and could produce just one or two weapons a year. Hence its costs were "only a fraction of South Africa's total defense budget." During its early production phase in 1987, its annual operating cost were some $6 million to $7 million a year, up from about $3 million in the early 1980s. Total estimated costs were about $850 million, not including the considerable costs of a ballistic missile program.¹²

Notes:

¹ Too little is known about the arsenals of Israel, India and Pakistan to include them here. [Back]

² Clifford G. Gaddy, The Price of the Past: Russia's Struggle with the Legacy of a Militarized Economy (Brookings, 1996), pp. 2-3. [Back]

³ Gaddy; The Price of the Past, p. 11. [Back]

⁴ However, because the Soviet economy was substantially smaller than that of the United States, the opportunity cost to the Soviet citizens was much higher in terms of expenditures diverted to nuclear weapons, which in a market economy might have been allocated to other things. It is worth bearing in mind that whereas the Soviet Union presented the only serious military threat to the United States throughout the cold war, it had to contend not only with the United States and NATO but with the nuclear arsenals of Great Britain, France, and China. Furthermore, U.S. and Western military bases literally surrounded the Soviet Union, increasing the forward-based threat. With the sole exception of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States was never threatened in this manner. [Back]

⁵ John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 52, 106-108. [Back]

⁶ Lewis and Litai, China Builds the Bomb, pp. 117-125. Additional information on China's nuclear weapons may be found in Robert S. Norris, Andrew S. Burrows, and Richard W. Fieldhouse, Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 5: British, French, and Chinese Nuclear Weapons (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994). [Back]

⁷ See Norris and others, British, French, and Chinese Nuclear Weapons. [Back]

⁸ Robert S. Norris and William M. Arkin, "Nuclear Notebook?British, French, and Chinese Nuclear Forces," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 52 (November/December 1996), p. 64. [Back]

⁹ House of Commons, "Operating Costs of British Polaris Fleet," 13 January 1997 (courtesy of Nicola Butler of the British-American Security Information Council). [Back]

¹⁰ Norris, Burrows and Fieldhouse, British, French, and Chinese Nuclear Weapons. [Back]

¹¹ These figures are based on official data that are not adjusted for inflation and may not represent the total costs of producing and maintaining the French nuclear arsenal. Author's electronic mail communications with Camille Grand, Institut de Relations Internationales et Strategiques (Paris). October 11-12. 1997; Marcel Duval and Yves Le Baut, L'arme Nucleaire Francaise Pourquoi et Comment? (Paris: S.P.M., 1991). pp. 247-48. For additional perspective on the French nuclear arsenal see Camille Grand, A French Nuclear Exception? Occassional Paper 38 (Washington, D.C.: Henry L. Stimson Center), January 1998; Giovanni de Briganti, "France Continues to Pare Down Nuclear Forces," Defense News, October 14-20, 1996, p. 40; and Reuters, "France Scraps Arsenal of Land-Based Nukes," The Washington Times, September 17, 1997, p. A14. [Back]

¹² Bill Keller, "South Africa Says It Built 6 Atom Bombs," The New York Times, March 25, 1993, p. A1; R. Jeffrey Smith, "South Africa's 16-Year Secret: The Nuclear Bomb," The Washington Post, May 12, 1993, p. A1; David Albright, "South Africa and the Affordable Bomb," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 50, No. 4, July/August 1994, pp. 37-47. [Back]

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