Bureaucratic Waste

The Cold War was a period of waste on a monumental scale in an "arms race" to nowhere, i.e. to "mutual assured destruction".

Here's an interesting bit from BoingBoing. I've put in bold the key bits:

The Safeguard Program was developed in the 1960s to shoot down incoming Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles. Built at a cost of 6 billion dollars in Nekoma, North Dakota, the site was a massive complex of missile silos, a giant pyramid-shaped radar system, and dozens of launching silos for surface-to-air missiles tipped with thermonuclear warheads.

However due to both its expense, and concern over its effectiveness and the danger of detonating defensive nuclear warheads over friendly territory, the program was shut down before it was even operational. Today its a military-industrial shell in the middle of nowhere, or in the words of Kaluz who added this great site to the Atlas, "a monument to man's fear and ignorance."

Here's another "monument" to the military waste, a boneyard of old planes at Davis Monthan Air Force base in Tucson Arizona. Literally tens of billions (if not hundreds of billions) in aircraft are brought here to be mothballed and eventually scrapped. Weapons mostly never used:


From this site a comment on the above picture:

The 3rd largest Air Force in the world is sitting here on the ground. It's also the only U.S. Air Force unit that actually makes a profit [the stuff is sold for "scrap", that makes the "profit"]. It's difficult to understand the size of the Boneyard and the number of aircraft stored there.

And the B52s, the big planes that carried nuclear bombs for 40 years:


Go here to get an idea of the variety and number of aircraft.