On FLI’s Trillion-Dollar Nuke App
In 2016 the Future of Life Institute (FLI) — an existential-risk nonprofit co-founded by MIT physicist Max Tegmark — was preparing a web app intended to make the case for cutting US nuclear-weapons spending. The pitch: the US plans to spend roughly $1 trillion modernizing its nuclear arsenal over thirty years, and the app would let visitors swap that budget for alternatives like doubling NASA’s funding, hiring 100,000 marines, building a Hyperloop, or ending world hunger. The reply below, written to Tegmark and the rest of the project group, argues that the app as drafted is misleading on three different axes — and that someone who actually wants the US military budget cut should be more careful about it than this.
The current version is misleading in many places. To highlight a few issues: The $1 trillion number is a total over thirty years, while many of the replacement items are only over one year. (In some cases, this is explicit, but in others it’s not even stated; eg. “Double NASA Funding” doesn’t mention that this amount is for just one year.) Naturally, this makes nuclear weapons seem relatively more expensive, and other spending cheaper, given equivalent annual budgets. Moreover, if we’re trying to examine concrete policy options, it’s usually impossible to greatly increase spending on something “for one year”, for both political and practical reasons. Eg., consider the “Hire 100,000 New Marines” item. The usual term of enlistment is four years; a Marine with only one year of service would barely have finished training. In addition, almost all of the associated infrastructure — the barracks, the weapons, the body armor, the vehicles, the administrative bureaucracy, the supply depots, etc. — are capital expenses that are slowly amortized over decades. Building out all this infrastructure, only to stop using it a year later, would be tremendously expensive and wasteful. A realistic policy alternative would involve expanding the Marine Corps over at least a decade or more, with a correspondingly higher price tag per soldier.
Several of the items appear to have costs that are widely considered unreasonably low. For example, Elon Musk’s stated cost for Hyperloop is $6 billion, but this is not backed by any kind of detailed calculation, and is simply assumed to be much cheaper per mile than comparable elevated concrete structures, even though untested new technology is almost always more expensive, not less. (It also explicitly doesn’t include the cost of getting to downtown SF from Hayward, or getting to downtown LA from Sylmar.) The “Hire 100,000 Soldiers” item appears to only include base pay; an American soldier’s combat pack alone costs around $20,000, IIRC, not including the costs of benefits, housing, vehicles, veterans’ care, air transportation, training exercises, and so forth. Infrastructure cost estimates notoriously underestimate final expenses, especially in the US. An estimate of $30 billion a year to end world hunger is frankly preposterous; that’s a food budget of just $3 per person per month, not including the cost of administration, transportation, and distribution, never mind the political and logistical challenges of operating in places like North Korea, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine and other countries with unstable or hostile governments, etc., etc. (I encourage anyone interested in global poverty to take a look at Wikitravel’s page on getting into the DRC ; in many countries, simply flying into the international airport is an expensive, time-consuming headache.)
As I think Seth touched on, the benefits of other spending are given in concrete terms, but the benefits of nuclear spending are left vague. If none of the given $1 trillion is spent on nuclear weapons, does that mean complete nuclear disarmament? (Nuclear weapons presumably require at least some maintenance, or they eventually stop working, like every other machine.) Would it mean reducing the US nuclear arsenal? If so, by how much? Would it mean removing one leg of the nuclear triad, and keeping the others? Would partial spending on nuclear weapons allow for some of the benefits of the $1 trillion to be kept? If so, which ones? Would other countries respond by increasing or decreasing their own nuclear spending? How does nuclear spending trade off against conventional military spending?
I say all this as someone who generally favors large cuts to American military spending. But it’s important to be accurate and fair; otherwise, those on the other side will think we aren’t taking their arguments seriously.