Features

by the "Nuclear Weapons Can Be Eliminated" Reporting Team

Producing, maintaining, and even disposing of nuclear weapons entail huge costs. If a portion of a national budget is allocated for nuclear weapons, this will naturally affect the livelihoods of the people.

During the second India-Pakistan war in 1965, Ali Bhutto, who was the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party and later became president, commented that should India produce nuclear bombs, Pakistan would counter by making nuclear bombs, too, even if they had to eat grass for that purpose. Afterwards, India and Pakistan in fact spent huge sums of money competing against each other in the development of nuclear arms.

However, the whole picture of nuclear weapons-related costs is veiled in the secrecy of national security and hard to pin down.

U.S. expenditure of 52.4 billion dollars

Researchers at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in the United States and others have analyzed that the U.S. nuclear weapons-related expenditure in fiscal 2008, including expenditure for measures against nuclear proliferation and development costs for its Missile Defense program, was 52.4 billion dollars, or roughly 4.8 trillion yen, "at a moderate estimate." This is the equivalent of Japan's entire defense budget for fiscal 2010.

In April of this year, the Obama administration also announced a spending plan of a total of 100 billion dollars, or about 9.2 trillion yen, for maintenance and modernization of intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic nuclear submarines, and long-range bombers for the next ten years. All of these are delivery systems designed to carry nuclear warheads. Nearly one trillion yen will be used every year solely for these systems.

Kevin Martin, 47, executive director of "Peace Action," the largest peace-related organization in the United States, expressed a sense of crisis, saying that the spending plan was in complete contradiction of the goal of "a world without nuclear weapons," which Mr. Obama has advocated, and that the massive spending from the government's tight finances, in itself, showed the reality that conservatives in Congress and the nuclear weapons industry still hold significant sway.

Other nations have followed suit. The British government plans to update "Trident," its own nuclear capability. It is estimated that building new submarines and missiles, and maintaining them for 30 years, will cost 76 billion pounds, or 10.3 trillion yen, in total. Another estimate says that it would amount to 100 billion pounds, or about 13.5 trillion yen.

Nuclear development-related facilities near Marseilles, France are now being dismantled. When we observed the inside of the facilities and gathered information there as the first news agency inside the compound, we heard that dismantling the facilities would cost 6.7 billion euros, or about 755 billion yen, by 2040.

Women with swollen necks

Such development, maintenance, updating, and dismantling of nuclear weapons takes a toll on people's lives. This is the outcome of the costs as well as other consequences. In February 2009, we reported on India, which has a population of over 1.1 billion people and promotes nuclear energy as well as producing and possessing nuclear arms. In India, we caught a glimpse of severe nuclear effects on people's health.

When we visited a fishing village with 170 houses in the neighborhood of atomic-energy research facilities that faced the Indian Ocean, we frequently saw women whose necks were swollen. A local doctor said that 35 people were suffering this symptom and many developed thyroid cancer. However, the doctor said that the government showed no signs of locating the cause or undertaking countermeasures.

A-bomb survivors (hibakusha) are still suffering from the aftereffects caused by the radiation of the atomic bombings.

Once nuclear materials contaminate human bodies and the global environment, including atmospheric nuclear tests that have been repeatedly conducted in various locations around the globe, it is utterly impossible to dispel the effects easily.

(Originally published on June 17, 2010)

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