Abstract
In this chapter—reproduced with permission from The Game of Disarmament: How the United States and Russia Run the Arms Race—Alva Myrdal highlights the risks associated in the conventional arms race and the exorbitant economic costs that this entails. In an age when the dominant preoccupation seems to be the nuclear arms race, Alva Myrdal does not neglect to draw attention to the far-reaching negative effects that the conventional arms have for society globally.
Reproduced with permission from “Stemming the conventional arms race,” from Game of Disarmament by Alva Myrdal, copyright © 1976 by Alva Myrdal. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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Notes
- 1.
No fixed boundary line can be drawn between nuclear and conventional weapons as several of the newer, most costly weapons systems are double-purpose. Missiles can be fitted with nuclear or non-nuclear warheads and are up to short-range ballistic missiles, produced and sold as conventional.
- 2.
SIPRI Yearbook 1976, pp. 16–20.
- 3.
International Herald Tribune, 8 July 1975.
- 4.
Bundesrat Bericht über die Sicherheitspolitik der Schweiz vom 27. July 1973, as quoted in Neue Wege: Zeitkritische Monatsblätter (Zurich), February 1974, p. 47 (author’s translation).
- 5.
SIPRI Yearbook 1975, p. 153 and chart 7.1, p. 150.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 195.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 196.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 152.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 191 and table 8B.2, p. 220. Latest figures in SIPRI Yearbook 1976, pp. 16 and 138. The detailed SIPRI estimates are conservative. It should be recalled that they encompass only major weapons systems – tanks, aircraft, vessels, missiles – and only those transfers going to Third World countries. Further, they are based on actual deliveries during the year in question. These facts explain the seeming discrepancies in relation to figures presented elsewhere. Official United States estimates are given in U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Trade 1963–1973, ACDA Publication no. 74 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 72–77. Its estimate for the world trade in arms was $8.7 billion in 1973, referring to total global sales and based on sales programs when purchases are contracted. Estimates currently rise sharply; a U.S. estimate for 1974, quoted in SIPRI Yearbook 1975, pp. 191–192, gives the totals for U.S. sales as $8 billion and for the Soviet Union as $3 billion. The U.S. estimate was raised to nearly $11 billion in August 1975. News media abound with more recent and ever more stupendously high figures for the world trade arms.
A basic source book, although the series ended in 1971, is Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The Arms Trade with the Third World (Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell; New York: Humanities Press, 1971). The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) has also published a detailed report, although less analytical; its series also ended in 1971: The International Transfer of Conventional Arms: A Report to the Congress from the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, U.S. Congress, Committee on Foreign Affairs, 93rd cong., 2nd sess., 12 April 1974. An older but more analytical study is Amelia C. Leiss et al., “Arms Transfers to Less Developed Countries,” Arms Control and Local Conflict (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1970) (C/70-1) vol. 3.
- 10.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Oil and Security, SIPRI Monograph (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1974), pp. 104–115.
- 11.
SIPRI Yearbook 1975, pp. 198–203.
- 12.
“Global Growth in Guns,” Time Magazine, 11 March 1974, p. 87.
- 13.
Derived from tables in ACDA, World Military Expenditures and Arms Trade 1963–1973 (see note 9 above).
- 14.
SIPRI Yearbook 1975, pp. 220–221. West Germany’s sales to Latin America are larger than those of the United States. It exports submarines and high-speed boats to the Third World. European countries have on the whole sold more high-performance weapons than the United States.
- 15.
The League of Nations’ Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Conference of 1932 made the recommendation for publishing military budgets in a draft convention, which was elaborated by a group of budget experts. The recommendation was tested on some budgets, the data obtained were analyzed, and a beginning of regular submission of budgets was made. See United Nations, Reduction of the Military Budgets of States Permanent Members of the Security Council by JO Percent and Utilization of Part of the Funds thus Saved to Provide Assistance to Developing Countries. Report of the Secretary General (New York, 1974), UN Document A/9770, 14 October 1974, Annex II, pp. 15–16. In regard to reporting on arms production and trade, considerable work was also done by the League of Nations, supervision of such trade having been one of the recommendations already in the League’s Covenant. Strong recommendations for both supervision of and publication about arms manufacture and trade were made by the French and American delegations. The Statistical Yearbook of the League of Nations was first compiled in 1925; in its last edition of 1938 “it contained particulars of the international trade in arms and ammunition of 60 countries and 64 colonies, protectorates and mandated territories.” SIPRI, The Arms Trade with the Third World, p. 94; section from pp. 86–100.
- 16.
Eighteen Nation Disarmament Conference Document ENDC/PV.156, 29 August 1963.
- 17.
Disarmament Conference Document CCD/421, 14 May 1974.
- 18.
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Documents CSCE/11/C/9. Swedish proposals, made in a statement of 28 September 1973, were accompanied by detailed comments as to possible models. Working Document CSCE/11/C/9. The success has so far been minimal. No recommendation to this effect appeared in the Final Act, signed in Helsinki, 1 August 1975.
- 19.
UN, Reduction of the Military Budgets, A/9770, 14 October 1974, p. 5.
- 20.
United Nations, General Assembly, Resolution 3463 (XXX), 11 December 1975. 108 voted for, China and Albania voted against, 21 members abstained: the United States and its allies in NATO and the Soviet Union and its allies.
- 21.
SIPRI, which in 1971 published its comprehensive study The Arms Trade with the Third World, is following it up with chapters in the consecutive yearbooks and is supplementing the information with its detailed Arms Trade Registers: The Arms Trade with the Third World (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975).
- 22.
Philip Noel-Baker, The Arms Race (London: John Calder, 1958), pp. 393–403.
- 23.
This “Swedish profile” has been strongly advocated by Anders Thunborg, Chairman of the Swedish Parliamentary Commission, in Doktrinutveckling och försvarsekonomi [The evolution of doctrines and the economics of defense] (Stockholm: Swedish Ministry of Defense, 1973), pp. 54–56.
- 24.
United Nations, Disarmament and Development: Report of the Group of Experts on the Economic and Social Consequences of Disarmament (New York, 1972), p. 24.
- 25.
Ibid., pp. 11–12.
- 26.
Dieter Senghaas, “Arms Race by Arms Control,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals, 1973.
- 27.
U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, The Economic Impact of Reductions in Defense Spending (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), p. 3.
- 28.
Report of the Committee on the Economic Impact of Defense and Disarmament, July 1965 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), p. 17.
- 29.
U.S. Senate Resolution S.1285, 1969.
- 30.
George McGovern, “Back to the Drawing Boards: Nth Round in the Arms Race,” Center Report, vol. V, no. 2 (April 1972), p. 7.
- 31.
For Bofors, popularly symbolizing the Swedish war industry, the military component of its sales in 1973–74 was 17%; for SAAB, with its military aircraft production, 15%; for Kockums, producing i.a. submarines, 2%; for Volvo, with military vehicles, and LM Ericsson, with electronics, 3%. Försvarsindustriella problem [Defense industry problems], report presented to the Defense Committee, Swedish Department of Defense, 1975. Recent reductions in defense orders have been compensated by other production and the normal rate of retirement of staff.
- 32.
UN Disarmament and Development, pp. 16–18.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 34.
Ibid., pp. 14–15.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 15.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 38.
Ibid., pp. 15–16.
- 39.
SIPRI, Resources Devoted to Military Research and Development (Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell, 1972). See also Program of Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, FY 1975, U.S. Congress, 93rd cong., 2nd sess., 26–27 February 1974, raising the request to over $10 billion (instead of the $8 billion mentioned in the literature quoted above).
- 40.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Plan of Action for the Application of Science and Technology to Development, Prepared by the Advisory Committee on the Application of Science and Technology to Development for the Second United Nations Development Decade (New York, 1971).
- 41.
Editors’ note: author refers to Chapter 1: The Reign of Unreason of her book The Game of Disarmament: How the United States and Russia run the Arms Race.
- 42.
Frank Barnaby, “The Spread of the Capability to do Violence: an Introduction to Environmental Warfare,” Ambio, vol. IV, nos. 5–6 (1975), pp. 178–185, table 4, p. 181.
- 43.
Quoted after Richard J. Barnet, The Economy of Death (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1969), p. 9.
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Myrdal, A. (2022). Stemming the Conventional Arms Race. In: Wallensteen, P., Bekaj, A. (eds) Alva Myrdal: A Pioneer in Nuclear Disarmament . Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12797-7_8
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