Keeble McFarlane

A few days ago I received an email from a former colleague showing some pictures of a US air base in the western state of Arizona, which is mostly a great desert. The pictures show thousands of aeroplanes parked in orderly rows, their windshields boarded up and all openings sealed to prevent dust and creatures from intruding.

This is a standard practice for storing old aeroplanes which might be used again, and also applies to civilian aircraft, thousands of which, no longer needed by airlines, are stored in the desert, where the dry air precludes the possibility of corrosion. The images are fascinating, but after looking at them for a while that fascination turned to dismay. It occurred to me that these objects sitting on the ground, representing millions of person-hours of work and billions of dollars of taxpayers' money, had no constructive function. They were not conceived, constructed and deployed for any other reason than to destroy people and things. It's indeed sobering to realise that for almost the entire history of mankind, the great preponderance of scientific and technological advances have been made for the sole intention of killing people.

Ancient cavemen fashioned heavy pieces of wood into clubs to bash in the heads of other people. They devised slings to hurl stones at their adversaries, sharpened straight pieces of wood to throw at them and discovered that by tying vines to the ends of springy boughs they could propel other small, sharpened sticks at people. Mankind learned that mixing certain powders together could blow things up, and discovered how to extract metals from the ground and fashion it into various forms of knives and swords. As the ages rolled by these developments evolved exponentially into the fearsome devices and systems we have today.
Making war, or merely thinking about the possibility, has occupied a disproportionate amount of humanity's intellectual and physical activity from time immemorial, and today has morphed into a giant economic phenomenon. Just consider the might of companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Dassault, ThyssenKrupp, Fabrique National Belgique, Movag and General Dynamics.

Each year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Initiative, the world's nations spend almost US$1 trillion to buy arms. This is not limited to the powerful ones, like the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India and Israel. The arms-limitation lobby group Control Arms says that countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East buy more than half the world's heavy weapons, yet these same countries experience the greatest threat to human life from poverty and disease. Consider this: in 1999, South Africa spent about US$6 billion to buy submarines, frigates, helicopters, planes and light weapons. That amount of money could have treated every South African suffering from AIDS for two years!

These poor countries are struggling to protect their people from disease and hunger, or to provide even the most basic education. Yet, according to Control Arms, in 2002 they bought more than two-thirds of the value of arms sold around the world. Where did they get these guns, explosives and armoured vehicles? An astounding 90 per cent came from the Big Five countries, which are the permanent members of the United Nations Security council - the US, Russia, Britain, France and China. At the same time across those regions, more than a billion people struggled to survive on less than a dollar a day; one child in five did not complete primary school; more than 14 million children lost one or both parents to AIDS; and half a million women died during pregnancy or childbirth.

By far the biggest spender on arms is the United States - it spends as much as all other countries combined! The US government's budget consists of two parts - mandatory spending to comply with the law - on things like social security, Medicare, debt-servicing, and salaries for civil servants. Discretionary spending this year is US$840.5 billion, 52 per cent of which is for the military - a whopping US$438.8 billion. The two next biggest items are education US$58.4 billion, and health - $51 billion.

To put military spending in context - the United Nations and all its agencies spend about $10 billion a year - a measly $1.70 for every person on earth. Many countries - the US being by far the main one - fail to pay up their annual dues or cut donations to voluntary programmes.

The arms-control groups point out that there are about 639 million light weapons in the world - one for every 10 people. These rifles, machine-guns and pistols cause 90 per cent of civilian casualties every year. Yet while we hear soaring speeches about the carnage, about how awful things are, the killing goes on unabated. And it's not limited to people using guns on others. Perhaps the most insidious form of weapon is the sleeping one - landmines. These diabolical devices are sown in the earth from the Falkland Islands, to Afghanistan, to the no-man's land between the two Koreas, to Angola and Mozambique, to Guantánamo Bay, in next-door Cuba. Mines sown across North Africa during World War II are still live, waiting for an unsuspecting person or camel to walk by. In 1994, President Bill Clinton was one of the first world leaders to call for a worldwide ban on the manufacture and sale of anti-personnel mines. Yet, when an international treaty proposed by Canada was signed in Ottawa three years later, the US was absent. It still refuses to sign the treaty as do several other countries, including Russia, China, Cuba, Turkey, North and South Korea, India and Pakistan - all of which employ mines.

The ubiquitous AK-47 rifle, which can fire multiple rounds, is the weapon of choice in most of the conflicts of the past half-century. Its inventor, Mikhail Kalashnikov, reflected ruefully upon this in 2002: "I would have preferred to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example, a lawn-mower."

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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