The Costs of nuclear weapons programs is enormous and for every dollar invested in advanced weapon systems a dollar less is invested in health, education, social welfare and development.
It has been argued that nuclear weapons are cost-effective because they provided more explosive power than conventional weapons. Today that is not completely true. We have extremely powerful and advanced conventional weapons today as it was demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq. The argument leaves out of consideration whether the extreme explosive power of a nuclear weapon is really needed. It leaves out of consideration the immense destruction of society and the environment and the unjustifiable loss of civilian lives.
The US has spent more than 5.5 trillion $ in developing their nuclear arsenal and France has spent about 1.5 trillion $. And these numbers do not include the costs of testing, fissile material production, storage and disposal. The costs for other nuclear weapon states are probably similar, but those numbers are not publicly available.
To put this into perspective the price of global elimination of starvation, provision of health care, provision of shelter and clean water, elimination of illiteracy, provision of sustainable energy, debt relief for developing countries, clearance of landmines and more has been estimated to be about 260 billion $ annually for 10 years.
The costs of disarmament can be very high as well and some nuclear weapon states, like Russia, find it hard to meet the costs to disarm, dismantle and dispose of nuclear weapons. However there is no doubt that in the long run it will be more cost-efficient to disarm globally than to maintain current nuclear arsenals. It costs a lot of money to simply store, transport and maintain nuclear weapons. It costs much more to develop new weapons and as long as nuclear weapons exist, history has showed that new weapons will be developed.
Let's try a thought experiment. What do you think the world today would look like without nuclear weapons? Would the power balances be much different than they are today?
If we have a look at conventional armies the US would still be the absolute world power. The other NATO countries, most notably the UK have already cut down their nuclear arsenals and rely more strongly on conventional weapons, so it can definitely be argued that the NATO side would be as strong in a world without nuclear weapons as it is currently. In South Asia, India has a large conventional army and without nuclear weapons in that region India would be the regions power. So if we would have to point out losers and winners, the losers would be Pakistan and Russia. But they are both countries with enormous economic problems. Both countries are positive to the idea of global and regional disarmament. Both countries would win by not having nuclear weapons, because eventually they will have to get rid of their weapons because their economy cannot survive sustaining nuclear programs forever. So probably the world would not look that different without nuclear weapons.
Can we conclude from this that nuclear weapons give a false sense of invincibility, but really do not make much difference in world politics?
Let's have a look at history since 1945. Have nuclear weapons made any positive difference in the course of history? They created the Cold War, but some would argue that they also finished it by corrupting the Soviet economy to a point where it could not survive.
Does this all mean that the trillions of dollars invested in nuclear weapons program instead of in development have really made no difference at all? Except for making the world a less