"It is a privilege to be here today to share with all of you the fruits of four years of intensive research into what should have been a relatively simple question: what did the United States spend on nuclear weapons? Atomic Audit is truly the first book anywhere to ask and answer the question of what creating and maintaining a nuclear arsenal has cost the United States. Starting with the very first government-funded research into the military potential of nuclear energy and proceeding to the present day, we have attempted to document all significant nuclear weapons costs, from the well known to the obscure.

In the limited time we have today, I cannot possibly delve into every fascinating aspect of U.S. nuclear weapons—from the enormously costly but ultimately futile attempt to develop a nuclear-powered strategic bomber, to plans to deploy nuclear missiles underneath the Greenland icecap, to an early and highly secret effort to detect Soviet nuclear tests which inadvertently helped spawn the myth that aliens crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico, to the numerous bunkers and command posts built in the 1950s and 1960s to allow military and civilian leaders to run the country during and after a nuclear war. For those stories and more you will have to read the book. But what I would like to do is touch on some of the more important findings of our work."