The cost of war with Iran
Here & Now Anytime
NPR
4.1 • 953 Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
Then, Negar Mortazavi, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, unpacks how the Iranian public is responding to the new leader and why his selection is a signal that Iran's leadership is digging in against the Trump administration's campaign against it.
And, defense spending expert Mark Cancian estimates the war is costing the U.S. nearly $1 billion each day. He talks about how expensive it could get.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. |
| 0:09.2 | MathWorks accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. |
| 0:17.5 | WBUR Podcasts, Boston. |
| 0:21.6 | This stuff does happen. |
| 0:26.6 | You have to determine what took place, why did it take place, and how do you minimize the risks of it happening in the future. |
| 0:33.6 | There is more evidence that it was an American missile that blew up a girls' school in Iran. |
| 0:49.1 | Today is Monday, March 9th, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBOR. I'm Chris Bentley. |
| 0:57.2 | Today on the show, who is Iran's new commander-in-chief? And what does his rise mean for the war |
| 1:03.7 | launched by the U.S. and Israel? Also, a little more than a week of war in the Middle East |
| 1:09.4 | has already shocked the global economy. |
| 1:12.2 | Each day also costs American taxpayers directly to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. |
| 1:18.0 | The largest expense has been the munitions. |
| 1:21.1 | We used the high-end missiles to beat down what was left of Iranian air defenses. |
| 1:26.6 | When a single missile can cost up to $4 million, you run up a tab pretty fast. |
| 1:33.3 | Before we crunch those numbers, though, the real cost of war is in lives, not dollars. |
| 1:40.6 | A seventh member of the American military has now died in the war, one of more than a thousand people |
| 1:46.9 | killed in the region, according to the Red Crescent, since Israel and the U.S. launched attacks |
| 1:52.0 | nine days ago. Most of the dead are Iranian. Israeli airstrikes on oil tanks and refineries over the weekend |
| 2:00.1 | poisoned the air over Iran's capital, |
| 2:02.8 | Tehran, turning the sky and rain black. Meanwhile, there's more evidence it was an American |
| 2:09.5 | attack that blew up the Minab Girls School in southern Iran in the first hours of the war, |
| 2:15.2 | killing 175 civilians, mostly children. |
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