Nuclear weapons, the scourge of mankind, are still prevalent in world society.

According to the Center For Defense Information, Russia and the U.S. still have a total of 28,800 nuclear weapons. The biggest question is WHY?.

Minuteman III Missile
Picture Source: US Air Force

Aside from the staggering cost of building and maintaining such a stockpile, how many nukes do we need? If we only had 1,000 would that be a problem? The U.S. alone is rated as having 10,455 warheads not counting the 274 that are slated for destruction. It seems that not all these weapons are operational, but about 7.000 are. We have about 1,600 tactical nukes but about 800 are operational. Tactical nukes are the kind that would be dropped on the battlefield and are generally much smaller than the type on ICBMs. But we also have a strategic reserve of 5000.

The Russians are said to have 8,400 nukes. Of this amount 5,000 are strategic with 3,400 being tactical but it is suggested that the amount of tactical nukes might exceed 10,000.

Now that we know about the nukes of the U.S. and Russia lets find out the price tag. The U.S. spent 3.5 Trillion Dollars between 1940 and 1995 on nukes. The Brookings Institute states the cost might be 5.8 Trillion for those years when hidden costs are figured in. Of course this includes the price for developing nuclear weapons. Every year the U.S. spends 27 Billion Dollars on the stockpile and related expenses, the Brookings Institute say its 96,000,000 dollars a day and 14% of the entire defense budget. We don't know how much the Russian's spent or should I say the former Soviets, but we do know it bankrupted them. And there are other expenses spawn by these warheads and that is the cost of delivery systems. These nukes would be delivered mostly by missile, bomber, cruise missile or sub launched missile. There are smaller planes that can deliver nukes but they would be used mostly for tactical purposes should a conflict erupt. If you had to buy a bomber, say a stealth bomber, like the B-2, it would cost you 2.5 billion dollars to buy and a couple of billion to maintain it for its lifetime. Yes you heard right, billions for maintenance The price of a Trident sub is also staggering, about the same price as a B-2, at 1.9 Billion dollars, not counting the missile. A minuteman missile cost $1,818,000 but the emplacement cost is said by some to top 1 Billion Dollars. The cheapest option is the cruise missile at 150,000 to 1,000,000 +. Unfortunately its low cost makes it attractive to rogue nations. Imagine if one of these countries decided to purchase thousands of these missiles and launched them all at once.

B-2 Bomber
Picture Source: US Air Force

So are we over protected? I think the answer is we have too many of the wrong and expensive weapons and that only serves to enrich the defense industry.
Its the same old story. Just look at the price of the new fighter planes. The F/A-22 Raptor program is going to exceed 36.8 Billion Dollars and no one knows by how much. If you pay 60 or 70 million dollars or more for a single fighter plane and your enemy can purchase planes for 8 million dollars that are not quite as good, he would still have a 8 to 1 superiority over you. I admit that nuclear weapons are a whole different ball game, but how many do you need to blow up the entire earth, because anything more than that is just a pork barrel. I mean does it make sense to say we need to be able to blow up the earth 17 times over to be safe? If we had 2000 nukes would we be more or less likely to be attacked than if we had 200,000?

Having such a huge arsenal presents other problems. Where do you store so many nukes, how can you make them all secure from attacks of different kinds, and where do you put the nuclear material you remove? These things have huge costs in money and environmental costs as well. Now I don't advocate for one second that we should not have nukes, we need some to protect ourselves as long as there are other nukes around. I just feel that we have been taken advantage of by companies with connections in government that were given these expensive contracts to build and maintain our nukes, all in the name of defense of the country, when the real motive was the good old U.S. Dollar. Why the Soviets have so many nukes is a different story. They became paranoid when they were attacked by the Germans and they also wanted to ensure that this could never happen again and they felt they had to out do us, but got caught up in an expensive arms race that they were ill prepared to maintain.

Cruise Missile
Picture Source: US Air Force

If we and the Russians really wanted to control nuclear weapons we could say, how about it, we each keep only a few hundred for now and if the rest of the world ever gets nuclear free, we will destroy what we have left. By driving this huge arsenal we foster the development of nuclear arms by other nations. Some nations think there is a prestige factor in having a nuclear bomb. Others want one because there neighbor, who they dislike has one. Look at Pakistan and India. The world was lucky that war never erupted between Russia and the U.S., and doesn't realize how close it came. Lets hope we never see a nuclear explosion again.

Missile Submarine
Picture Source: US Navy