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The costs of US nuclear weapons research — including those of its new ‘stockpile stewardship’ programme — have been called into question by a report published last week. According to the report, the United States has spent $5,500 billion on nuclear weapons since the start of the Manhattan project in 1940.

A 700-page study published by the Brookings Institution, Washington's pre-eminent liberal think-tank, says the cost of maintaining the US nuclear deterrent is now down to $35 billion a year. Of this, $4.5 billion is spent on ‘stockpile stewardship’, the programme designed to ensure the safety and reliability of US nuclear weapons.

Pointing out that annual expenditure on “activities now called stockpile stewardship” averaged $3.6 billion (in 1996 dollars) between 1948 and 1991, the study, entitled Atomic Audit, questions why the programme's budget is higher than it was during the Cold War.

William Weida, professor of economics at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, and co-author of the report, argues that the programme has “huge amounts of money for construction projects which appear only to be intended to ensure continued employment at the national laboratories”.

He is already working on a further study that will “conservatively estimate” that stockpile stewardship “could be done for half or less” of the budget that the Department of Energy has allocated to it.

But Robin Staffin, deputy assistant secretary for nuclear weapons research at the Department of Energy, says the stewardship programme “is balanced, prudent and cost-effective”.

Congressional appropriators in both houses have recently agreed to fund the programme next year at the requested level of $4.5 billion. But Weida says the proposed budget for stockpile stewardship includes large amounts of money for construction projects “whose uses are not yet specific, but which will evidently be dreamt up later” by the nuclear weapons laboratories.

Although the Clinton administration has said that the programme will cost $45 billion over the next ten years, construction costs of planned facilities tail off after the year 2003, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars for additional facilities.

Staffin argues that it is normal for the Department of Energy to reserve money in its budget projections for undefined construction projects. He adds that the department is exploring the need for various such facilities, although it has not yet given its backing to any.

One proposal is a successor to the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test facility at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. Another is a pulsed-power fusion device at the Sandia Laboratory, planned for possible construction on the mothballed nuclear weapons test site in Nevada.

More than half of the money Brookings says has been spent on nuclear weapons since 1940 — $3,200 billion — has gone on deploying weapons systems. Research, development and production has cost $410 billion; the clean-up of nuclear facilities has consumed just $45 billion.