Total worth of USA's nuclear weapons

ha, i'm picturing kim jong ill sitting amongst the shards of a broken piggy bank

Maintenance is not capitalized, R+D is. As I said.

Sure, as an Intangible Asset.

True, and valuation of R+D is incredibly difficult in all fields, especially never-tried-before technologies. I remember meeting v. Braun many years ago and asking if he didn't get discouraged with all the endless crashes of rockets before he found some fuel or design that worked and I remember his answer no, because he extracted every possible datum from studying each failure, so in that sense they weren't failures at all. It is said that Thomas Edison tried 10,000 filaments for using inside lightbulbs until he found one that worked - I don't know if that's literally true, though.

The odds are that someone else tried the thousands of filaments until they found one that worked, that Edison then patented the design, and fired the employee when he asked for a bonus.

We should have hired Willy Ley.