Making Money from War
EDITORIAL, 15 Aug 2022
#758 | John Scales Avery, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
A Vast River of Money
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world spent 2.113 trillion US dollars on armaments in 2021. Of this almost incomprehensible amount of money, the United States spent almost half the total , $801 billion.
Perhaps one reason for the disproportionately large US arms spending is that in the United States, the arms industry has been privatized, which is not the case in China or Russia. In the US, selling weapons and death is a business. It is a business, on which capitalist investors can make enormous profits, selling weapons and selling war.
Selling Weapons and War Abroad
The United States is by far the largest exporter of weapons in the world. The US sells weapons through NATO. It also sells weapons to dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, and these same weapons have produced a humanitarian catastrophes such as starvation in Yemen. Small arms exported to Africa deepen and prolong local conflicts.
The aggressive foreign policy of the United States is closely related to the profits made by arms manufacturers.
Militarism’s Hostages
Do our “Defense Departments” really defend us? Absolutely not! Their very title is a lie. The military-industrial complex sells itself by claiming to defend civilians. It justifies vast and crippling budgets by this claim; but it is a fraud. For the military-industrial complex, the only goal is money and power. Civilians like ourselves are just hostages. We are expendable. We are pawns in the power game, the money game.
Nations possessing nuclear weapons threaten each other with “Mutually Assured Destruction”, which has the very appropriate acronym MAD. What does this mean? Does it mean that civilians are being protected? Not at all. Instead they are threatened with complete destruction. Civilians here play the role of hostages in the power games of their leaders.
A thermonuclear war today would be not only genocidal but also omnicidal. It would kill people of all ages, babies, children, young people, mothers, fathers and grandparents, without any regard whatever for guilt or innocence. Such a war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, destroying not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere.
There is much worry today about climate change, but an ecological catastrophe of equal or greater magnitude could be produced by a nuclear war. One can gain a small idea of what this would be like by thinking of the radioactive contamination that has made an area half the size of Italy near to Chernobyl permanently uninhabitable. It is too soon to know the full effects of the Fukushima disaster, but it appears that it will be comparable with Chernobyl.
The environmental effects of a nuclear war would be catastrophic. A war fought with hydrogen bombs would produce radioactive contamination of the kind that we have already experienced in the areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima and in the Marshall Islands, but on an enormously increased scale. We have to remember that the total explosive power of the nuclear weapons in the world today is 500,0000 times as great as the power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is threatened by a nuclear war today is the complete breakdown of human civilization.
Besides spreading deadly radioactivity throughout the world, a nuclear war would inflict catastrophic damage on global agriculture. Firestorms in burning cities would produce many millions of tons of black, thick, radioactive smoke. The smoke would rise to the stratosphere where it would spread around the earth and remain for a decade. Prolonged cold, decreased sunlight and rainfall, and massive increases in harmful ultraviolet light would shorten or eliminate growing seasons, producing a nuclear famine. Even a small nuclear war could endanger the lives of the billion people who today are chronically undernourished. A full-scale war fought with hydrogen bombs would mean that most humans would die from hunger. Many animal and plant species would also be threatened with extinction.
Incidents in which global disaster is avoided by a hair’s breadth are constantly occurring. For example, on the night of 26 September, 1983, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, a young software engineer, was on duty at a surveillance center near Moscow. Suddenly the screen in front of him turned bright red. An alarm went off. It’s enormous piercing sound filled the room. A second alarm followed, and then a third, fourth and fifth, until the noise was deafening. The computer showed that the Americans had launched a strike against Russia. Petrov’s orders were to pass the information up the chain of command to Secretary General Yuri Andropov. Within minutes, a nuclear counterattack would be launched. However, because of certain inconsistent features of the alarm, Petrov disobeyed orders and reported it as a computer error, which indeed it was. Most of us probably owe our lives to his brave and cool headed decision and his knowledge of software systems. The narrowness of this escape is compounded by the fact that Petrov was on duty only because of the illness of another officer with less knowledge of software, who would have accepted the alarm as real.
There is a danger that our world, with all the beauty and value that it contains, will be destroyed by this cynical game for power and money, in which civilians are militarism’s hostages. Will we let this happen?
Searching for Enemies
Because the world spends roughly two trillion dollars each year on armaments, it follows that very many people make their living from war. This is the reason why it is correct to speak of war as a social, political and economic institution, and also one of the main reasons why war persists, although everyone realizes that it is the cause of much of the suffering of humanity.
We know that war is madness, but it persists. We know that it threatens the survival of our species, but it persists, entrenched in the attitudes of historians, newspaper editors and television producers, entrenched in the methods by which politicians finance their campaigns, and entrenched in the financial power of arms manufacturers – entrenched also in the ponderous and costly hardware of war, the fleets of warships, bombers, tanks, nuclear missiles and so on.
In his farewell address, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned his nation against the excessive power that had been acquired during World War II by the military-industrial complex.
Eisenhower’s words echoed those of another US President, George Washington, who warned against “overgrown Military Establishments”
The military-industrial complex needs enemies. Without them it would wither. Thus at the end of the Second World War, this vast power complex was faced with a crisis, but it was saved by the discovery of a new enemy, communism. However, at the end of the Cold War there was another terrible crisis for the military establishment, the arms manufacturers and their supporters in research, government and the mass media. People spoke of the “peace dividend”, i.e., constructive use of the two trillion dollars that the world wastes each year on armaments. However, just in time, the military-industrial complex was saved from the nightmare of the “peace dividend” by the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
No matter that the attacks were crimes committed by individuals rather than acts of war, crimes against which police action rather than military action would have been appropriate. The Bush Administration (and CNN, Fox, etc.) quickly proclaimed that a state of war existed, and that the rules of war were in effect. The Cold War was replaced with the “War on Terror”.
To a large extent, this over-reaction to the events of 9/11/2001 can be interpreted in terms of the needs of the military-industrial complex against which Eisenhower had warned. Without a state of war and without enemies, this vast conglomerate of organizations and pressure groups would have languished.
If the aim of the “War on Terror” had been to rid the world of the threat of terrorism, acts like illegal assassination using drones would have been counterproductive, since they create many more terrorists than they destroy. But since the real aim is to produce a state of perpetual war, thus increasing the profits of the military-industrial complex, such methods are the best imaginable. Urinating on Afghan corpses or burning the Koran or murderous night-time raids on civilian homes also help to promote the real goal, perpetual war.
For those who belong to the military-industrial complex, perpetual war is a blessing, but for the majority of the people of the world it is a curse. Since we who oppose war are the vast majority, can we not make our wills felt?
War was always madness, always immoral, always the cause of unspeakable suffering, economic waste and widespread destruction, and always a source of poverty, hate, barbarism and endless cycles of revenge and counter-revenge. It has always been a crime for soldiers to kill people, just as it is a crime for murderers in civil society to kill people. No flag has ever been wide enough to cover up the atrocities of war.
But today, the development of all-destroying thermonuclear weapons has put war completely beyond the bounds of sanity and elementary humanity.
Can we not rid ourselves of both nuclear weapons and the institution of war itself? We must act quickly and resolutely before our beautiful world is reduced to radioactive ashes, together with everything that we love.
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John Scales Avery, Ph.D., who was part of a group that shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and Associate Professor Emeritus at the H.C. Ørsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is chairman of both the Danish National Pugwash Group and the Danish Peace Academy and received his training in theoretical physics and theoretical chemistry at M.I.T., the University of Chicago and the University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles both on scientific topics and on broader social questions. His most recent books are Information Theory and Evolution and Civilization’s Crisis in the 21st Century (pdf). Website: https://www.johnavery.info/
Tags: Anti-militarism, Arms Industry, Arms Trade, Capitalism, Casino Capitalism, Catastrophe Capitalism, Corruption, Demilitarization, Disaster Capitalism, Elites, Finance, Greed, Pentagon, Post-capitalism, Predatory Capitalism, Profits, Super rich, War Economy, Warfare, World Order
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 15 Aug 2022.
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What Professor John Scales Avery says is true and accurate.
But, SIPRI in Sweden, mentioned by John, like CAAT in the UK and GCOMS in Spain all they do is inform politicians about how WELL they are doing with their sales. Publicizing to the world the size of Death contract between countries, all it does is to encourage politicians to increase sales. And this is NORMAL. Governments and their representing politicians are very competitive. For example, when politicians, diplomats and secret agents involved in military negotiations read that France sold more air-fighters than the UK, they immediately become jealous, envious and push sales harder.
John says Armed Force do not defend us, but they are not meant to ‘defend’ anybody except themselves. No soldier in the world kills for sport, or because he has a passion for killing. He only kills to avoid being killed by the opposite team, his government call ‘The Enemy’.
One must be mad to call ‘Defense’ the act of flying over a city dropping bombs that destroy human and animal life, destroy Nature, the environment, destroy families, societies and buildings, destroy our economy. Launching torpedoes, bombs, rockets, scud missiles, are only meant for destruction, they defend NOTHING.
In fact, if you look at the professional adverts for sales promotion of the above mention items, one sees all the time ‘of PROVEN LETHALITY; or “of IMPROVED lethality”.
But, the ignorant and gullible masses still speak of the Defense industry, Defense Forces instead of what the professionals call it, the WAR industry.
The fact that most of the War industry is in private hands, makes not the slightest difference to War and Peace. Even if nobody, private or State, benefitted from military sales, killing instruments are made for killing. Besides, there is the working force, all those millions and millions of workers in the military industry, with families to feed. If John Scales was the Manager of a State-owned rocket factory, he will also be voting for politicians who organise military conflicts. Otherwise sales will decline and he’ll lose his job.
John puts is clearly and succinctly “War was always madness, always immoral, always the cause of unspeakable suffering, economic waste and widespread destruction, and always a source of poverty, hate, barbarism….. ” ignoring the multi-billion businesses war creates for construction companies, for rebuilding what war destroyed. Manufacturers of military uniforms and boots are equally delighted, for dead soldiers are buried in their uniform, so that a permanent supply of uniforms needs to be ready. The flower industry also benefits from war, as do the funeral parlours, coffin makers and religious corporations. They are all together in the War Industry. As the United Nations is, with its commercial “Refugee Agency”, a multi-billion dollar business.
I remember when in 1974 Saddrudin Khan, then in charge of UNGCR opened the Refugee Camp in Cyprus, for Cypriots escaping the civil war the UN created (human gullibility is infinite). A good friend of mine was Khan’s secretary. She said to me. The camp is meant to be there for many years, to welcome the millions of refugees the UN plans to create with more wars in Syria, Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Iran and Somalia.
Of course, since 2020, new asylum-seekers in Cyprus are mainly from India, Bangladesh, Cameroon and Pakistan. Syrians still come. Antonio Guterres’ patriotism is present in the current conflict he manages to ‘supervise’ so well, the Russo-Ukrainian war. Millions of Refugee money have gone to Portugal. Many of the refugees stay there and the rest uses Portugal as a platform to other destinations. For the UN, it is BUSINESS AS USUAL.
I said it many times and I say it again – and I shall never tire of saying it – the ONLY solution is the Universal Abolition of Militarism, with will make of the War Industry an ‘obsolete’ business. With the present system, scientists working to help humanity live longer and better are paid far less than scientists working on our decimation. Pure ABSURDITY