Distributed evenly to everyone living in the United States at the start of 1998, the total estimated cost of nuclear weapons equals $21,646 per person. Represented as bricks of new $1 bills (such as one can obtain at a bank, bound at $200 to the inch) stacked on top of one another, $5,821,027,000,000 would stretch 459,361 miles (739,117 kilometers), to the Moon and nearly back. If $1 was counted off every second, it would take almost 12 days to reach $1 million, nearly 32 years to reach $1 billion, 31,709 years to reach $1 trillion, and almost 184,579 years to tally the actual and anticipated costs of nuclear weapons. Laid end to end, bricks of $1 bills equivalent to the sum actually expended on U.S. nuclear weapons since 1940 ($5,481,083,000,000) would encirle the Earth at the Equator almost 105 times, making a wall more than 8.7 feet (2.7 meters) high.
Copyright © 1998 The Brookings Institution