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Military aircraft may cost from several million dollars apiece to over 500 million dollars for one Stealth bomber

One aircraft carrier may cost over a thousand million dollars

Trafficking in Death

While the world spends about a trillion dollars a year for armaments:

800,000,000 people live in absolute poverty

770,000,000 do not have enough food for an active working life

100,000,000 are without shelter

1,300,000,000 do not have safe drinking water

14,000,000 children die each year because of the effects of hunger

THEY have been called Merchants of Death, Gravediggers of Civilization, A Cancerous Tumor on the Body of Society. Who? The world’s arms merchants. Why?

In former times, they kept troops equipped with swords, spears, axes, and pikes for man-to-man slaughtering on the battlefields. In this century, they made and delivered the guns, bombs, tanks, warships, airplanes, poison gas, and ammunition for killing tens of millions of people in the two world wars while ruining billions of dollars of material resources, such as cities, homes, and other property. They have fueled the more than 120 wars fought since the end of World War II.

They continue to fuel bloody wars in various parts of the world. They train Third World armies for more effective use of their weapons. They have equipped world military powers with a stockpile of nuclear weapons able to blow up the human family several times over and transform the earth into an uninhabitable planet. They seem to be completely unscrupulous. Their watchword could be: “Your death​—our profit.”

No business has affected the human family as deeply as the arms business. The evidences are clear. The next article will reveal some disturbing facts.

The Arms Trade​—How It Affects You

“THE problem in defense spending is to figure how far you should go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.” When former U.S. president Eisenhower said that in 1956, the global military expenditures in constant prices were less than half the present levels. How has this enormous expansion of the armament business affected you? A research report, World Military and Social Expenditures, will illustrate:

1. At present levels of world arms spending, the average individual can expect to give up three to four years of his life working to pay for it.

2. Extravagant weapons purchases have built up a huge pyramid of public debt for future generations.

3. The neglect of social needs in the pursuit of military power has left 1 person in 5 living in grinding poverty. The global population suffering from illiteracy, poor health, and chronic hunger steadily grows.

4. The military emphasis on high technology produces relatively fewer jobs than would be created by comparable sums spent for education, health, inner-city housing, and other civilian needs. Unemployment rises.

5. There is 1 soldier per 43 people in the world but only 1 physician per 1,030 people.

6. Years of military excesses have created an environment that is more unstable and more dangerous to human life than in any time in history.

7. Weapons of mass destruction, on hair-trigger alert, hold all of humanity hostage.

An Enormous “Theft”

The world’s poor are the most affected by the arms business​—in the richest countries as well as in the poorest. Dwight D. Eisenhower put it this way: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labours, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children.” What does this “theft” mean to the victims?

It takes schooling from them:

▪ The cost of a single new nuclear submarine equals the annual education budget of 23 developing countries with over 160 million school-age children.

▪ The budget of the U.S. Air Force is larger than the total educational budget for over a billion children in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, excluding Japan.

It takes money from them:

▪ In recent years the Third World has taken 75 percent of the world’s arms imports​—a reckless use of foreign exchange that has left many burdened with unmanageable foreign debts.

▪ By 1988 the combined external debt of the Third World countries had reached a colossal $1.3 trillion ($1,300,000,000,000).

▪ The world’s military budget each year equals the income of about 2.5 billion people in the 44 poorest countries.

It takes food and drink from them:

▪ It costs $590,000 a day to operate one aircraft carrier, while every day in Africa alone, 14,000 children die of hunger or hunger-related causes.

It takes health and life from them:

▪ Every minute an average of 30 children die from the most common diseases in the world. These could be prevented by vaccination, sanitary measures, and proper nourishment if social and health demands were put ahead of military power.

▪ A vaccination program that would protect 750 million children against infectious diseases is estimated to cost only two days’ expenditure for world armaments.

▪ In the poorer countries, the average life span is 30 years shorter than in the richer countries, due in part to the neglect of health needs in the pursuit of more arms.

Indeed, the arms merchants carry a heavy responsibility for the miserable world conditions. How do they feel about these conditions? “We have no problems of conscience. We are contributing to our own development,” says the foreign vice-minister of a leading arms-producing country. But the average person may ask, ‘Can it be stopped?’

The world’s nations have spent 15.2 trillion dollars ($15,200,000,000,000 in 1984 U.S. dollars) on the arms race since 1960. And the demand for arms continues. For example, in 1987 military expenditures reached a new high at 1.8 million dollars a minute! Twenty-two hot wars, with at least 2.2 million casualties, were fought in 1987​—more wars than in any previous year in recorded history!a The war between Iran and Iraq, ranked as the bloodiest and most resource-consuming local war in recorded history, for years soaked up arms from all over the world.

While there is much talk of peace, global military expenditures reached about a trillion dollars. Actually, the world spends nearly three thousand times as much on military forces as on peacekeeping efforts!