ABSTRACT
This chapter examines various interventions regarding the cost of war, namely how such a notion defined against which definition of national wealth should post-war wealth compares, the distinction between financial and economic cost. It describes the more comprehensive notion of the cost of war, which integrates categories of costs and losses that are less easily amenable to numerical or financial measurement and yet weighed considerably among the dimensions that called for authoritative assessment and around which public political debate and social agitation were largely structured. The chapter focuses on a singular episode, that of the settlement of the war debt to the United States, which views as the most significant occasion on which Italian statisticians, acting as a tightly-knit techno-scientific phalanx, made an efficient contribution to the country's financial stability which provides the regime with a diplomatic success that secure its position.
