(The Nationalist, 11 April 2003)
The opening lines of the United Nations Charter read, ‘In order to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…’ The UN began with that hope. Its foremost organizational structure for preventing war is the Security Council. But the five permanent members of the Security Council – the USA, Russia, Britain, China and France – are also the world’s five largest arms exporters. I am sure they can see as clearly as you or I that there is a contradiction (not to use stronger language) between the roles of Security Council member and arms exporter.
How do they justify it? A standard answer is for them to say, ‘If we are not in the arms trade, someone else will be’. That is the same argument that was used two centuries ago to justify participation in the slave trade. At that time, in an attempt to make the slave trade sound like something for which individuals were not responsible, appeal was made to impersonal market forces. The argument ran, ‘The trade is there; the law of supply and demand finds its own level’. Slaving nations even tried to make their participation sound like an act of virtue: if they left the field to others, they said, slaves would not benefit; on the contrary, because their rivals were unscrupulous, the sum of human suffering would be increased.
Here are a few facts and figures about the global arms trade:
Mr. Jayantha Dhanapala, UN under-secretary-general for disarmament, quoted the Brookings Institute as stating that the US nuclear programme had cost $5.6 trillion ( a trillion is a million million) since it began. He also said that global military spending in 2001 was $839 billion ( a billion is a thousand million).
Britain is the third largest arms exporter – at between £5 and £6 billion a year. In 1998, British Aerospace had on its books orders worth £36.6 billion.
US companies control 50% of the international arms market, and 160 of the world’s 190 nations receive arms or military training from the USA.
Between August 1998 and August 1999, ten international and 25 civil wars were fought.
World-wide there are 500 million small arms in circulation.
The ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, wrote in his Politics, ‘It is difficult for armed men to live in peace’. A statement of the obvious, perhaps?