America Is Updating Its Nuclear Weapons. The Price: $1.7T | Hacker News Reader

America Is Updating Its Nuclear Weapons. The Price: $1.7T

nytimes.com

11 pointssherilm25 comments

IIRC also includes delivery platform acquisition costs: 12 SSBNs @ (lol) 10B per boat, and 100 B21s @ 700m per bird, ~400 (silo/deployed) +250 (reserve) sentinels to replace 400+50 minutmen. Something like 150B/100B/150B for Sea/Air/Land delivery vehicles.

Actual modernization of warhead/ordnance = more accuracy / efficiency against bunker / hardened targets - effectively adds ~500-1000 deployed warheads since less will be needed to hit (current) ~800 silo based nukes in RU/PRC, the latter probably going to add 2000-3000 warheads to reach parity with US in next 25 years.

Lazy napkin numbers: 70B per year (all inclusive) over 25 years, or ~$400 per tax paying American per year, ~$10000 over 25 years. Which TBH, will likely definitely go over budget since it includes so many different porkbarrel projects across many states, on the otherhand the hardware will probably be kept going for more than 25 years. Maybe B21 is going to see 100 years of service like B52s.

I'm curious how much people would pay per year for nuclear deterrence, including those from non nuke countries. $400 bucks a year seems pretty steep. SSBN/sub costs have doubled per boat over last generation. Land based ICBMs are somehow also stupid, stupid, expensive per silo @350m per. I feel like PLA rocket force can probably get 5-10 TELs+DF4X for that cost. B21s surprisingly good value. How many would "unsubscribe" from legs of the triad when each triad works out to 10bux per month?

And this is on top of the F-35 program.

To paraphrase the late senator Everett Dirksen, "A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking real money."

Let’s spin up more of these boondoggles, and also start a few more wars in the Middle East, and then also start a war with China and Iran at the same time. Lindsey Graham already has his tissues and lotion on the ready. We only owe 37 trillion dollars, we gotta get those numbers up.

After spending and upgrading all these facilities, wouldn’t this make America, and every other country, less safe in aggregate?

Since in the current environment it’s impossible to imagine decision makers in other world capitals wouldn’t respond and enact countermeasures accordingly.

Yes. I feel like most "national security" politicians that push policies are emotion driven to a way greater extent than the rest.

The US is replacing systems that are well beyond the lifespan anticipated for them when they were designed: it is not AFAICT increasing total number of weapons. Also, they're not doing anything AFAICT that Russia hasn't already finished doing.

Also, I bet the Times is including the cost of the B-22, which is technically part of the US strategic arsenal in that it can carry nukes, but if you could ask Pentagon leaders why they want it, they'd reply mainly with non-nuclear missions.

The only reason South Korea, Japan, Germany, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, etc, don't have nukes is that they have felt safe enough in the security guarantees made to them by the US, but if the US's strategic arsenal continues to age while Russia and China modernize theirs, how long will they feel safe enough?

That may be what the pentagon believes and desires others to believe…

But since those in other world capitals aren’t mind readers nor can they inspect every department and facility to verify these claims, then it’s practically certain they will assume negative intentions to some degree…?

> The US is replacing systems that are well beyond the lifespan anticipated for them when they were designed: it is not AFAICT increasing total number of weapons.

Well, if they were well beyond their anticipated lifetime, then the number was down and things were fine.

>then the number was down

I don't follow. The number of what?

Countries eventually recognize that arms races are bad not just for safety but also for economic reasons, so nuclear arms reduction treaties such as START are signed. But even in the confines of those treaties, each country is obliged to make their fixed number of warheads to be better than others.

Not sure that it's relevant but Russia stopped participating in the current US-Russia treaty (New START) in 2023 and it would expire in 2026 regardless.

Imagine the infrastructure and energy systems we could build with that money. There isn't going to be anything left to fight over at this rate of global climate change. What a waste and sad world we live in.

The existing nuclear arsenal already serves its purpose: deterrence. Not sure why we need to upgrade them. If these start flying, it doesn't matter if a few don't work, the result is the same.

Everybody knows these things become less effective after N years without an overhaul. At some point, it's not much deterrence if you assume the unmaintained warheads are unlikely to detonate and the unmaintained launch systems are unlikely to launch.

We might not need to overhaul them, but in order to keep their deterrence, we need everybody to know we've overhauled them.

If we actually do want to overhaul them, it's useful to do so relatively frequently so the knowledge and practices aren't totally lost.

https://archive.ph/syzum

The entire Manhattan project was developed on about $22B in 2024 dollars.

Is it a fair comparison? The Manhattan project spent 3 years building a single-digit number of bombs 80 years ago, versus 30 years of building submarines, stealth bombers, and missiles to deliver a couple of thousand nuclear warheads.

That depends on official inflation numbers, which are low only because of cheap imports from China. Anything that has to be built in America -- houses, metro lines, nuclear weapons -- has gone up about 12%/year with the S&P 500. There was a ~1.8x bump between the start of COVID and now, and now things are looking more like 15%/year to me. Which makes the half-life of money only five years.

Lovely, let’s end the goddamned world instead of solving climate change or, poverty, or building a future for the next generations. Maybe death by fire, starvation and freezing are what we deserve if we choose to act like this.

Where are the “it’s too expensive” republicans now. This is bonkers. We’re investing trillions in weapons whose sole purpose is to end the world. Just batshit.

Imagine investing this insane amount of money in healthcare and education

24% of the entire US federal Medicare budget every year is dedicated SOLELY to dialysis[1], for K-12 we spend nearly a trillion every year, with increasingly worse results [2]. This is less than two years of spending on education spread across 30. The idea that the US does not spend a lot of money on things like education and healthcare is so unbelievably wrong it makes me think I'm taking crazy pills. We spend so much on these things and get essentially nothing for it, because people just keep thinking we don't spend money on it instead of putting pressure to investigate why our public services are money furnaces that turns taxpayer funds into illiterate adults[3].

Edited to add a missed word.

[1] https://www.kidney.org/federal-investment [2] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 [3] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...

24% of the entire US federal budget every year is dedicated SOLELY to dialysis[1]

This seemed implausible and indeed the linked page doesn't say that. It says that 24% of Medicare spending goes to patients with kidney disease. Medicare is 14% of the Federal budget: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-government-s...

That's about 3.3% of the Federal budget going to patients with kidney disease. Since kidney disease is comorbid with other health problems it's not clear how much of that spending is for dialysis, though it is still a lot of spending on people with kidney disease.

You are absolutely right, I missed a word there - edited to reflect.

Since this is HN where the house style is

  -Wpedantic -Werror

I'll note that the correction is flawed too: it's 24% of Medicare (the program for old people), not Medicaid (the program for low income people).

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