Men at arms
Mary Kaldor
The size of the arms trade is difficult to grasp. At over $10,000 million, more than double what they were ten years ago, world- wide arms exports are still growing. All the major industrialised nations are involved to a greater or lesser extent. The products range from war-surplus small arms, chan- nelled through numerous, often circuitous,' routes to clandestine corners of violence, to the most sophisticated missiles and aircraft that money can buy and governments sell.
Anthony Sampson has written'a powerful account of the business which is not like any other business, although the salesmen say that arms are no different from cars or wash- ing machines, chocolates or novels. (The French super-salesman, General Hughes de l'Estoile, likes to explain that the deaths caused by French arms sales abroad are only six per cent of deaths produced by foreign sales of French cars.) The story is a tragicomedy of grand design and greed. Well-known figures such as Richard Nixon, Prince Bernhard and Franz-Josef Strauss mix with improbable characters like Kodama, the Japanese war criminal, or Khashoggi, the Arab tycoon who lives in a Boeing 727 and is fabled for his hospitality. The scandals, the stories of bribery and extortion, and the intrigues that emerge from behind what the Japanese call the `black curtain' take on an unexpected coherence as part of a system inevitably producing a 'growing frenzy to push weapons into the new markets', Anthony Sampson describes the increasing role of governments in this bloody trade and, with it, the development of the arms salesman from 'frenetic inventor' like cannon king Krupp, via the 'ruthless capitalist' por- trayed in Shaw's Major Barbara to the `genial bureaucrat' of modern times. And he describes the changing nature of the weapons, from the majestic nineteenth-cen-, tury battleship to the modern F-14 fighter, the 'flying computer', the `MiG-killer', which can 'shoot up like a rocket at a speed of over Mach 2 .. . turn and manoeuvre for dog fights . . carry a multi-barrel gun and . .. launch four Phoenix missiles simul- taneously against four targets'; from the little Maxim gun which slaughtered thousands in the First World War to the modern, accurate and horribly cruel devices which the US Army prefers to call 'kill mechanisms'.
Britain is not excluded from the story; indeed. it is a major participant in the arms trade. Britain is the fourth largest exporter of arms, perhaps the third since the French tend to exaggerate their arms sales and the British tend to play them down. At Alder- shot last year the Ministry of Defence mounted an exhibition of military equip- ment, 'a cosy occasion', according to Anthony Sampson, 'with marquees and plenty of refreshments like a sports day or a horticultural show'. The British Defence Equipment Catalogue, printed in three glossy volumes, is the envy of arms sales- men the world over. And in the central hall of the Ministry of Defence there is a per- manent exhibition of instruments of death for the visits of foreign generals and poten- tates; members of the British public, as I have personally discovered, are not allowed in. The story circulates, though it may be apocryphal, that it was here that the Chief of Staff of an unnamed Arab country met the Israeli Chief of Staff.
Anthony Sampson's book is an indict- ment of the private manufacture of arms. He argues, convincingly, that it was the end- ing of the aerospace boom combined with the oil crisis, and not any new threats to American security or to the security of importing nations, that produced the frenzy of the last few years. He draws a parallel with the ending of the railway boom in the 1880s which drew Vickers, Krupp and Car- negie into the arms business, and produced such base figures as Sir Basil Zaharoff. The argument that arms exports are needed for the survival of the arms companies (to pre- serve a manufacturing capacity at times when it is not needed by domestic armed forces) is a persistent theme. It is expressed by Armstrong's agent Lord Rendel in 1886, by an American naval officer in the 1890s, by the Kaiser's War Minister in 1913, by Roosevelt's adviser Bernhard Baruch in 1935, and by a number of modern government officials and salesmen. So long as the manufacture of arms remains in pri- vate hands, so long, that is to say, as the arms companies are governed by the prin- ciple of independent viability, which involves profit-making, that argument will remain valid. Anthony Sampson says that the connection between 'arms sales and profits will always distort foreign policy . . the huge stakes involved in a deal, with the web of agents, commissions and bribes, can distort a whole nation's economy all in the name of private shareholders'.
What is implicit here, and .explicit in the book, is a case for nationalising the arms industry. It is a long-standing one, made by Philip Noel-Baker in his classic book The Private Manufacture of Arms, published forty years ago; and it has been made more recently by Professor Galbraith. It is par- ticularly apposite now with the national- isation of the British aerospace and ship- building industries, and with the tottering of Dassault in France. But as we know from the experience of Rolls-Royce or Aeros- patiale (the French public aircraft com- pany), nationalisation must mean more than just the transfer of ownership. It must mean abandonment of the principle of independent viability. It must mean that
arms production is strictly subordinated to domestic military needs and need not indeed should not — make a profit. Like- wise, it must mean that military man- ufacturing capacity need not — should not be fully employed in peacetime. National- isation in this sense can also be expected to lead to a reduction in domestic military spending. Anthony Sampson refers to the `cost over-runs, the bail-outs and the waste- ful rivalries between companies and ser- vices': it would not be surprising if the prac- tices of the international arms trade were sometimes adopted domestically as well. The allegations about Dassault last year included the preparation of bogus wage records to justify high prices for planes. More importantly perhaps, the enormous growth in the sophistication and complexity of weapons, at an astronomical cost, might he dampened down if the sales maximising interests of private enterprise were eliminated.
Obviously this would mean finding alter- natives for employment. Anthony Sampson recognises that the problem calls for rede- ployment of resources and manpower on a major scale. He sees the crisis of aerospace as part of the crisis of the West involving energy, wasted resources and pollution, the `crumbling freeways' and the 'isolated sub- urbs' of California, a crisis which can never be overcome through resort to arms man- ufacture but only through the redirection of industry. Indeed, seen from another perspective, the conversion of the arms industry offers an enormous potential. It is startling to discover that Britain is the sec- ond most science-intensive economy in the West and that locked up in the military sec- tor are extraordinary skills and talents. There are, for example, the intellectual and manual workers at Lucas Aerospace who have put forward detailed proposals for redeployment into such things as radar- based sight for the blind, new forms of transportation like hybrid road-rail vehicles or fuel-saving cars, and new energy devices.
This is perhaps the only way to progress. Sampson is pessimistic about international agreements: there are too many countries and too many bitter disagreements. Arms control will depend on the initiatives of one or two important countries, the United States or perhaps Japan. The Japanese Ambassador to the United Nations has urged the necessity of not waiting for agreement on nuclear disarmament before tackling the enormous leviathan of arma- ments which is casting dark shadows on the world'. It is not just a matter of the size of the conventional arsenal. It is also the increase in the accuracy and destructiveness of new weapons, for this most dangerously narrows the gap between conventional and nuclear force. In the Lebanese devastation, `a second-hand war fought with small arms and artillery', 40,000 or 50,000 lives were lost — more than in four Arab-Israeli wars and most of these were noncombatants. This was, as Anthony Sampson shows, a logical consequence of the arms bazaar.
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