The Billboard Campaign: The Los Alamos Study Group and the Nuclear Public Sphere
In the domestic realm of U.S. politics, the nuclear weapons complex has always maintained two extreme attributes: phenomenal cost and social invisibility. While seemingly opposed, these aspects are actually reinforcing, a structural effect of compartmentalized secrecy, patronage networks, and an implicit nuclear security consensus among policy makers. Stephen Schwartz (1998) has documented that between 1940 and 1996 the United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons. This makes the bomb the third largest federal expenditure since 1940, ranking just after nonnuclear military spending and Social Security—accounting for roughly eleven cents out of every federal dollar spent ( Schwartz 1998: 3). Yet despite this colossal investment and the widespread distribution of nuclear production, testing, and waste sites across the continental United States, most Americans have little or no knowledge of the historical or continuing investments in weapons of mass destruction by the United States. It remains a disturbing truth that today most Americans can say more about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions (which, in 2003, were the target of the first explicit policy of preemptive warfare in U.S. history) than those of the United States. Most would be surprised to learn that the 1990s witnessed not a post–Cold War movement away from nuclear weapons but rather the establishment of a new nuclear status quo in the United States, one requiring a massive reinvestment in the nuclear program. Nuclear weapons budgets at the national laboratories, for example, have exceeded their Cold War averages since 1995 and have doubled since 1998.
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