The Cost of Nuclear Weapons

[Oscar]

The Cost of Nuclear Weapons

September 3, 2006.

After coming home from the World Peace Forum in Vancouver, optimistic
and excited that our planet could have a possible future as a world of peace, it was exceedingly disappointing to hear that our federal government, under the leadership of the Hon. Stephen Harper, is initiating the spending of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money for additional tools of war. Weapons that will not be used to protect Canadians from invaders, but are going to be used by the Canadian military to hunt down who, we have been told, are our enemies in a foreign sovereign land.

Doug Roche, a great Canadian, was elected four times as a Member of Parliament, and appointed to the Senate in 1998. He is also an author of seventeen books, and is a man totally dedicated to bringing about a more peaceful world.

The following is an excerpt from his latest book, "Beyond Hiroshima" The heading is "Visualizing the Cost of Nuclear Weapons"---

"Distributed evenly to everyone living in the US at the start of 1998, the total estimated cost of nuclear weapons equals $21,646 per person. Represented as bricks of new $1 dollar bills, [such as one can obtain at a bank, bound at $200 to the inch], stacked on top of one another, $5,821,027,000,000 would stretch 459,361 miles, [739,117 kilometers] to the moon and nearly back. If $1 was counted off every second, it would take almost 12 days to reach $1 million, nearly 32 years to reach $1 billion, 31,709 years to reach $ 1 trillion, and about 184,579 years to tally the actual and anticipated cost of nuclear weapons. Laid end to end of $ 1 bills equivalent to the sum actually expended on nuclear weapons since 1940, [$5,481,083,000,000] would encircle the earth 105 times, making a wall 8.7 feet [2.7 meters] high."

The figures above were taken from Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons since 1940---Stephen I. Schartz [ed] Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C. 1998, p.6. [ Used with permission]

The national debt of the US is rapidly approaching $10 trillion. This does not include corporate or consumer debt. The US is spending over $400 billion annually to increase their supply of war material. To most of us that looks like a recipe for impending financial disaster.

So why is our Prime Minister and his government pursuing closer ties to the Bush administration?

Yours sincerely,

Leo Kurtenbach,
Box 268,
Cudworth, Sask., S0K 1B0.
Ph.# 306 256 3638.
email: leokurt@sasktel.net