The Bomb as a Really Expensive Marketing Tool

One of the best history books I've ever read is Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I read it more than two decades ago, and that's how good it is: It sticks with me now as a stunning narrative and a deeply informative history. If you ever even pause while wandering by a place like WIRED, much less come in the door, you would love this book. Tech, science, culture, incredible human stories, da bomb, all handled masterfully.

I'm pleased to see Rhodes is still talking about the bomb. This time, in a talk about the future obsolescence of nuclear weaponry, he apparently discussed how most of the immense amounts we spent on nukes were essentially spent to market security.

From the incredible kottke:

Richard Rhodes recently gave a Long Now talk called The Twilight of the Bombs about the future obsolescence of nuclear weaponry. From Stewart Brand's summary of the talk:

How much did the Cold War cost everyone from 1948 to 1991, and how much of that was for nuclear weapons? The total cost has been estimated at $18.5 trillion, with $7.8 trillion for nuclear. At the peak the Soviet Union had 95,000 weapons and the US had 20 to 40,000. America's current seriously degraded infrastructure would cost about $2.2 trillion to fix – all the gas lines and water lines and schools and bridges. We spent that money on bombs we never intended to use – all of the Cold War players, major and minor, told Rhodes that everyone knew that the bombs must not and could not be used. Much of the nuclear expansion was for domestic consumption: one must appear "ahead," even though numbers past a couple dozen warheads were functionally meaningless.

Wish Ida been there.

And I like this addition from Brand, at bottom of his post:

At dinner Rhodes reflected that nuclear weapons may come to be seen as a strange fetishistic behavior by nations at a certain period in history. They were insanely expensive and thoroughly useless. Their only function was to keep a bizarre form of score.

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Vid: 1945-1998 (by Isao Hashimoto, Japan, © 2003. This shows the 2,053 nuclear explosions that humans set off from 1945 to 1998.