Between the invention of nuclear weapons and the turn of the twenty-first century the U.S. spent over five trillion dollars building and maintaining its nuclear arsenal–about one-tenth of the country’s total spending since 1940. In America, annual spending on past and present military activities exceeds spending in all other categories of human need; approximately eighty percent of the national deby is estimated to have been created by military expenditures.
The so-called “military-industrial complex” is thus…the single largest consumer of the country’s resources.
–Lydia Millet, 2005