The price of nuclear security

It may come as a surprise that the U.S. spends much more on its arsenal than it does on minimizing risk or planning for the consequences of an attack.  Deepti Choubey and Stephen Schwartz today released a startling assessment, the first public examination of open-source data, showing that the U.S. spent at least $52.4 billion on nuclear weapons and programs in fiscal 2008.  "Although the size of the overall budget is troubling... the government spends relatively little money locking down or eliminating nuclear threats at their source, before they can reach U.S. shores ($5.2 billion), or preparing for the consequences of a nuclear or radiological attack on U.S. soil ($700 million)."  Schwartz is the editor of the Nonproliferation Review and coauthor of Atomic Audit, the definitive report of how much the U.S. has spent on its nuclear weapons program since 1940. Choubey is the deputy director of the nonproliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a former member of Ploughshares Fund's staff.