Editor’s Note

On the brink of the new millennium, the planet is awash with weapons and scarred by wars. The two phenomena are, of course, linked. Not all wars are directly caused by the accumulation of arms. But weapons certainly perpetuate conflicts and fuel the fear, mistrust and instability that give rise to them.

This twin scourge afflicting humanity is the subject of the following pages. Our opening article, by Lora Lumpe of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, sets the scene by reviewing the global trade in arms—who is selling what to whom and in what quantities. Although the end of the Cold War brought a sharp drop in the legal trade in conventional weaponry, she writes, huge sums are still spent on arms sales, which continue to bolster “repressive governments, to undermine democratic and economic development, and to encourage and enable the waging of war around the world”.

Arms are big business, and their manufacturers, like those of any other commodity, spend millions on marketing their products. Glenn Baker, a writer/producer for the America’s Defense Monitor television programme, describes how US arms companies lobby Washington decision makers and saturate the capital with advertising of a startling insidiousness and mawkishness. In the world of the weapons advertisers, tanks, submarines and planes are not hyper-efficient killing machines, but benign devices that prevent war, protect loved ones and boost the economy.

Proponents of NATO expansion claim the move will cement peace and democracy in Europe by extending to other countries the security and political benefits accruing from alliance with the Western family of nations. But a less publicised motive for expanding NATO is arms sales: new members will incur defence obligations to bring their militaries up to par. Tomas Valasek of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., examines whether a bigger NATO really will mean huge sales for Western arms companies.

Most of today’s conflicts are fought not with the heavy advanced weaponry and “smart bombs” familiar from the Yugoslavia air war, but with small arms—pistols, rifles, grenades and light machine guns. These pose a formidable and urgent challenge to conflict resolution and peace keeping. Owen Greene of the Peace Studies Department at the University of Bradford, UK, details the special characteristics that make the transfer and accumulation of small arms so easy.

Since the time of the prophet Isaiah and before, humanity has dreamed of “beating swords into ploughshares”, of converting military resources to peaceful use. Michael Brzoska of the Bonn International Center for Conversion looks at two major aspects of military conversion in the 1990s: industrial conversion, and base closure and redevelopment.

Destructive as conventional weapons are, they lack the awesome lethality of their non-conventional counterparts. Of these latter, biological weapons are particularly sinister to the popular consciousness, silent, invisible killers that slay en masse in peculiarly horrible ways. Malcolm R. Dando and Simon M. Whitby of Bradford University’s Peace Studies Department review the chief anti-personnel and anti-crop biological agents. They also consider what developments the new biotechnology may bring, including the possibility of so‑called genetic weapons designed to target specific ethnic groups.

The ultimate doomsday weapon is of course the nuclear bomb. Ever since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, debate has raged as to whether the bomb is a threat to human existence that has to be removed, or whether in fact its terrible power can serve peace by deterring aggression. That debate is reflected in this issue of Global Dialogue. Putting the case for the peace potential of nuclear weapons is Ernest W. Lefever of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. He rebukes nuclear “pacifists” and “demonisers” for exaggerating the likelihood of a nuclear Armageddon. The lesson of the Cold War is that deterrence works.

The counter-argument comes from a perhaps unexpected quarter. General George Lee Butler was Commander-in-Chief of the US Strategic Command from 1992 to 1994. As such, he was, in the words of Jonathan Schell, “the man to whom the president, if the evil day had come, would have issued the command to launch America’s nuclear arsenal, and who, in turn, was charged with delivering that order down the line”. Yet today he is an impassioned and eloquent advocate of total nuclear abolition. In his article, he recounts the personal odyssey that took him from belief in nuclear deterrence to the conviction that nuclear weapons must and can be abolished.

Our final article on the nuclear issue is by the father and son team, Anatoli and Alexei Gromyko of the Russian Academy of Sciences. They provide a detailed review of Russia’s nuclear capability and of the latest diplomatic moves to secure cuts in the Russian and American nuclear arsenals. Faced by an expanding Western alliance with a huge lead in advanced conventional weaponry, Russia feels it has no option but to put increased reliance on nuclear weapons to protect its sovereignty.

The lessons of the Kosovo war are investigated by Richard Falk of Princeton University. He subjects the notion of “humanitarian intervention” to detailed scrutiny, enquiring whether it is “morally, legally and politically feasible in the post–Cold War world”. He argues that the NATO effort was “dangerous and ill-conceived” and that the high-tech, one-sided nature of the war encourages the Anglo-American public “to convert warfare into a new kind of electronic bloodsport”.

Conflicts such as Kosovo, Rwanda and others are often reported as resulting from “ancient ethnic hatreds”. This explanation is altogether too simplistic, argues Michael Renner of the Worldwatch institute in Washington. Today’s wars have multiple social, economic, political and environmental causes. Ignoring these in favour of the “ethnic hatreds” explanation is an excuse for inaction.

One of the most tragic aspects of warfare is the exploitation of children as soldiers. Approximately three hundred thousand children, some as young as ten and under, are fighting today in numerous wars around the globe. Michael Wessells of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, US, describes the factors that facilitate the widespread use of children as soldiers, the physical and psychological toll inflicted on the young combatants and the long-term damage caused to the societies from which are abducted.

Soldiers hate war. That is the message of countless battle memoirs, war poems and fictional representations of combat, which stress the suffering and terror of the fighting man. But this picture tells only half the story, according to Joanna Bourke of University College, London. Her research on the letters and diaries of British, American and Australian soldiers in the two world wars and the Vietnam War uncovered numerous expressions of sheer, quasi-sexual delight in the act of killing. Her article supplies a fascinating corrective to the received view of how ordinary soldiers react to warfare. In relating the attitudes of actual fighting men, it also makes a fitting conclusion to an issue devoted to weapons and war. 

Paul Theodoulou

Autumn 1999