Worldwide Armaments Expenditure
In late 1969 the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency surveyed the arms spending of 120 countries. The latest year for which they had comprehensive data was 1967. Then the world's military expenditures totaled an incredible $182 billion. This averaged $53 for every man, woman and child on earth. (One estimated average for 1970 was $56) This $182 BILLION for defense was approximately 7% of the total Gross World Product.
Note also that the average per-capita income — including the U.S. — is only 720 dollars per year. That means the world spends 7 percent of its citizens' income ($53 per man, woman and child) on armaments and the military. More staggering is the fact that about 28 out of 142 nations have a per-capita yearly income of $100 or less — close to the $53 per person spent on armaments and military worldwide.
If the recent rate of increase in military spending continues to climb as at present, the arms race may cost $4 trillion over the next decade. This is FOUR TIMES the yearly Gross National Product of the United States. This exceeds the total value of all U.S. land, buildings, machinery, cash and business.
If one silver dollar coin were dropped every second, it would take 126,000 years to exhaust this amount of money estimated to be spent on world armaments in the next ten years. Or this four billion dollars could pave the entire nation of Denmark with one-dollar bills — or a string of thousand dollar bills to the moon and back. More to the point, this four billion could virtually feed, clothe, and house the world's poor for a year.
According to UNESCO, world arms expenditure between 1964 and 1966 was climbing faster than Gross World Product.
For every dollar the world devotes to closing the rich-poor economic gap, $20 are spent on arms. In 1969, the world spent three times as much on arms as it did on health. Resources devoted to education also take a back seat. This area receives 40 percent less than arms. As one writer put it, "the pen is much less mighty than the sword."
The estimated $200 billion the world spent in 1970 on armaments would provide TEN MILLION families with a fine, moderate-cost suburban-type home. The price tag of one of the new prototype bombers equal the price of many tractors.
Price Tag of Armaments Goes Up
Meanwhile the grisly "kill cost" per individual enemy death has mounted dramatically. In the days of Julius Caesar it cost about 75 cents to kill an enemy soldier. Because of inflation and greater technology, the cost rose to about $3,000 per enemy dead during Napoleon's time.
Since then the cost has risen with burgeoning defense expenditures. During World War I, it cost the United States about $21,000 to kill an enemy soldier. World War II was even more expensive — costing ten times that amount.
Already, the war in Vietnam is costing the United States $170,000 per enemy death. One estimate put the total at over half a million dollars when all costs such as war debts, veterans' benefits, are considered.
As a result, the cost of armaments and military becomes a weighty economic burden, especially for many poor nations.
Somehow, we find ourselves unavailed of statistics which would show how much money the world has spent, or would be willing to spend, to keep a man alive.
Many emerging new nations, whose desperate business should be the pursuit of a better life for its citizens, turns instead to the arms traffickers and asks about costs.
Usually, the graphic cost comparisons between airplanes and tractors, tanks and trucks, mortars and ploughs, rifles and rakes are not considered. And yet, newly independent countries find themselves in the control of a revolutionary new government which came to power largely because it continually highlighted the terrible plight of the average citizen of such country.
Notably, the dismantlement of Empire in Africa; the retreat of the Colonial Power era into the maze of newly constructed, autonomous countries. The screams of peace, freedom and the good life which brought such governments to power quickly turned to cries for arms, as each new government looked about itself, frightened at the new neighbor government, or tribalism within its own boundaries.
While country after country in Africa should have busily pursued agrarian reforms, campaigns against disease, malnutrition, illiteracy, and stifling superstition, it found itself, instead, caught up in the same mindless search for killing implements as the rest of humankind.
The first order of business, it seems, is to put the peasant in a uniform — not a better home. And so the arms race goes on — and on — and on.
United States — Biggest Arms Dealer
The United States is the biggest trafficker in world arms. This may seem shocking for a nation pledged to peace. Yet, the United States has found itself in the grips of the burgeoning arms race, burning up its economic strength to arm a world at war.
In the 24 years since World War II, according to one estimate, the United States has sold or given away some of the following implements of war:
2,150,000 military rifles
1,445,194 carbines
82,496 submachine guns
30,668 mortars
25,106 field guns and howitzers
93,000 jet fighter planes
8,340 other planes
2,496 naval craft
19,827 tanks
448,383 other combat vehicles 31,360 missiles
Selling arms is big business as well as a prime instrument in the power game nations play. The United States, Soviet Union, France, Britain all sell arms for both reasons. For example, the Soviet Union reportedly supplied Egypt with $2.25 BILLION worth of arms in the 31 months between the end of the 1967 Middle East War and January 1970. This in hopes of extending its sphere of influence in the Middle East.
It is estimated that approximately three quarters of the world's arms spending is done by the Soviet Union and the United States. The United States in one recent six-year period sold arms worth at least $13.3 billion to 57 countries — including Egypt — which was being supplied so generously during this time by the Soviet Union.
Dizzying U.S. Defense Budget
The United States has continued its immense spending on defense and armaments. President Nixon's budget sent to Congress on January 29, 1971 asked for $77.5 BILLION for national defense, including nuclear weapons, for the fiscal year ending in June 30, 1972. This was a staggering ONE THIRD of the $229.2 billion total outgo projected for that year. Defense spending was by far the biggest single item on the budget.
Meanwhile, many feel that the defense budget must climb to more dizzying heights. Some economists forecast that a $100 billion budget is inevitable.
Part of the rising expenditure is the increasing cost of the weapons used. For example the proposed Advanced Manned Strategic Aircraft — successor to the B-52 — would cost 12 to 15 MILLION dollars apiece. Here are some other comparisons, showing the increasing costliness of weapons:
Aircraft carrier in World War II $55 million
Carrier Nimitz, now being built $545 million
Destroyer in World War II $8.7 million
Latest destroyer $200 million
Submarine in World War II $4.7 million
Latest nuclear submarine $200 million
Bomber in World War II $218 thousand
B-52 bomber built in 1961 $7.9 million
Fighter plane in World War II $54 thousand
F-11 fighter plane $6.8 million
M-1 rifle made in 1946 $31
M-16 rifle used in Vietnam $150
Perhaps even more frightening than the rising cost of weapons is the dangerously increasing destructive power of modern weapons.
The Era of Overkill
In ancient warfare, generally one man could only kill one other man with a single effort. With the introduction of gunpowder and cannons one man could dispatch several of the enemy. When machine guns, bombs and high-powered artillery became available, the destructive power at one's beck and call increased mightily.
Then came our modern age with nuclear power, poison gas, chemical and biological warfare. Now one man's decision can annihilate entire cities — and could cause a chain reaction of events to annihilate all life!
Today we talk about "overkill." That is BOTH the United States and the Soviet Union have enough weaponry and atomic power to annihilate each other many times over.
The fear of better weapons being developed by the "enemy," QUALITATIVELY, as well as quantitatively, drives each nation onward in its never-ceasing search. Better means of delivery (what a sickeningly appropriate word), with better trajectory, better and more efficient warning systems; the search for anti-missile missiles, and anti-anti-missile missiles, and anti-anti-anti-missile missiles and anti-anti-anti-anti-missile missiles, and . . . all this goes on and on.
A deer hunter, armed with high-powered, scope-sighted rifle, has little use for a machine gun. But nations, armed to their nuclear teeth with a panorama of weaponry to give an imaginative "Mars" a blinding headache, continue to build, and store for future use, terribly potent arms.
It is said that by 1975, the present American stockpile of 4,600 strategic nuclear warheads could reach a total of 11,000.
By comparison, the Soviet Union currently has 2,000 strategic nuclear warheads. But according to the survey of one authoritative institution for strategic studies: "The more disturbing aspect of current research and development programs is qualitative rather than quantitative."