Interview with Stephen Schwartz About Accountability of the US Nuclear Weapons Program

Lidija Simlesa, Graduate Research Assistant at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, interviews Stephen Schwartz, Editor of the Nonproliferation Review, about his research on accountability of the US nuclear weapons program.
With US federal government spending, particularly defense spending, now expected to decline sharply over the next decade—even as the Obama administration has pledged to invest almost $200 billion in upgrading the US nuclear arsenal and its supporting infrastructure, it becomes increasingly important to know where our nuclear security dollars are going on both an annual and a cumulative basis. This is true whether one supports or opposes various nuclear security programs or merely wants to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent as efficiently as possible.
Yet today, as has been the case for more than six decades, no one in the federal government has any clear idea how much is being spent on nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs. This is especially true for programs managed by the Department of Defense (DOD), where most nuclear security dollars are spent. This situation exists because there is no comprehensive budget that tracks all these programs and costs within and across government organizations and over time. Ensuring accountability and transparency for nuclear security spending has never been a priority. In fact, some program and congressional officials may have actually preferred to keep their colleagues in the dark.
But as cost-cutting becomes the modus operandi in the federal budget making process, it becomes increasingly important to understand where our nuclear security dollars are going, and why. Failure to understand the full measure of costs associated with the nuclear weapons program will contribute, as it has in the past, to poor budgetary and programmatic decisions and wasteful or misguided spending. But in this newly constrained fiscal environment, such decisions could have dangerous consequences for both the nuclear arsenal and for a variety of nonproliferation, counterproliferation, and arms control programs that contribute to US and global security.
Fortunately, there is a relatively easy way to resolve this longstanding problem, one that can create a more logical and cost-effective approach to nuclear security spending, protect it from political pressure and build public support for particular efforts, and strengthen the viability of the key programs for years to come.

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