The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project was completed in August 1998 and resulted in the book Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 edited by Stephen I. Schwartz. These project pages should be considered historical.
Except where indicated, all figures in this book have been adjusted for inflation and are expressed in constant fiscal year 1996 dollars. "Then-year dollars" represent the prices of goods or services current at the time they were sold. "Constant dollars" have been adjusted for the effects of inflation. Dollar costs for past expenditures are adjusted by adding inflation. This permits a comparison of expenditures over time that, although still imperfect, is less distorted than if current dollar expenditures were used, and it allows the reader to view costs in terms of the dollar's approximate purchasing power at the present time. Except where noted, these adjustments have been made using standard Department of Defense (DOD) deflators. More specific methodological considerations are taken up in each chapter, as necessary.

Except as noted, all years referred to in this volume are fiscal years. Before 1976 the government's fiscal year ran from July 1 to June 30. In 1976 the beginning of the fiscal year was moved back to October 1, so that year has a transition quarter (76T) from July 1 to September 30.

This volume makes extensive use of the DOD's Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) historical database, a computerized budgeting system inaugurated by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1961 to track all major defense programs via unique "program element" numbers. This database is classified and access to it is strictly controlled. Requests under the Freedom of Information Act by private researchers for its declassification were routinely denied. In response to a December 1994 request by the authors, however, most of the historical data on funding for the more than seven hundred program elements relating to nuclear weapons were declassified and made available to in March 1996. These data enabled us to analyze and compare annual direct program costs for most major DOD nuclear weapons programs over fiscal 1962-95. In conjunction with the publication of this book, portions of the FYDP data are being made available on the World Wide Web (http://www.brookings.edu/scripts/projects/nucwcost/nuke_req.pl), affording scholars, journalists and others unprecedented access to this information in a useful, interactive format.

The budgetary data in this book came from several major sources. Whenever possible, we have used original and not deriviative data and turned to secondary sources such as books, scholarly journals, and newspaper accounts only as necessary. For data on Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear weapons programs, we relied principally on the official semi-annual and annual reports of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 1946-1975, official AEC histories, the Budget of the United States Government, and hearings before various congressional committees. We also consulted reports of the General Accounting Office (GAO), the files of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) at the National Archives, and declassified government documents available at the nongovernmental National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

For DOD programs, data for fiscal 1946-61 come principally from semi-annual and annual reports of the Secretary of Defense, official histories of various programs, other DOD publications and the U.S. Historical Military Aircraft and Missile Data Book.1

For data after fiscal 1961, we relied upon the FYDP historical database, along with a variety of other publications. Additional data come from GAO reports, congressional hearings, papers at the National Archives, and declassified government documents available at the nongovernmental National Security Archive.

This study asseses only those nuclear weapons costs borne by the federal government, although state and local governments also shoulder some of the burden. This includes support for law enforcement (such as assisting facility security forces and accident response training), environmental monitoring programs, road maintenance, and sewage treatment. We have not attempted to count such costs in this study, but they should be considered when measuring the overall costs of nuclear weapons.

Notes:

1 Ted Nicholas and Rita Rossi, U.S. Historical Military Aircraft and Missile Data Book (Fountain Valley, California: Data Search Associates, 1991). [Back]


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