Discussion about the arms production and war

It started with the following letter from a visitor to my Czech pages:

With some of your ideas one could definitely agree, e.g., as regards the admission of the countries of the southeastern Europe into NATO, but some of your claims are more than disturbing.

To stop all the arms production, and convert everything to peace production? I am not completely sure what all those companies involved would produce after that? What would the XXX number of people who would lose work do? You may not realize that, but money earmarked for armaments do not just disappear without a trace. Somebody has to produce those arms and get paid for it - these will always be people. Whether you want it or not, these monies are actually invested by the state into itself (when locally produced arms are purchased). These companies certainly pay back fairly big taxes on their earnings. And by the way, the effort to get better arms has driven the companies involved in this activity to look for ever better technologies. I do not know for sure but maybe without this effort the world would be rather behind. Maybe we would still be without jet airliners, and would only dream about nuclear power stations or personal computers.

The next issue is the reduction of the number of arms. Surely, yes, but only to a certain extent. You can never be sure that no country or organization accumulates weapons for an attack against another country. At the moment when a general reduction of the number of arms to a minimum were achieved, the risk of an attack would increase enormously. Europe has not been isolated any more for a long time now, and the current globalization is rather detrimental to her in this respect. It has not been true for a long time now that what is going on behind the ocean, cannot threaten us. Intercontinental ballistic missiles are no longer owned only by Russia and the USA!

November 25, 1999
Caha Ladislav, ladislav.caha (at) seznam.cz
Student of Military Academy, Brno

My response of November 27, 1999:

What I wrote is my challenge to others to think about the future. Of course I do not suggest to close overnight all the arms producing factories and leave their employees suddenly jobless. Nor to make some other step (such as some kind of a unilateral disarmament) that would throw the world suddenly into chaos. If we really want to improve something, we have to change the conditions slowly so that people have time to get used to it, and make adjustments.

Unlike you, I think that if one succeeded to completely stop the arms production, the rate of technological progress would be even faster than now (I'll return to this below in more detail).

Definitely, I do not think it is wise to increase the funds spent on arms production, and to continue developing new arms. On the contrary, an ever increasing portion of the present-day armaments budget should be moved over to projects that would improve mutual communication and better understanding of today's potential enemies, and involve them in ever growing cooperation.

I consider your argumentation against stopping the arms production because it employs a large number of people to be absurd and a relict of the old way of thinking which has to be overcome. Do we really have to produce forever in large quantities the means for mutual killing of people only because it ensures a good living for a certain group of people?

I would like to see a convincing proof of what the manufactured weapons are useful for. I think that enormous means would be saved world-wide if the governments simply continued to pay the people now employed in the armaments industry and in the military the same salaries they have now, for doing nothing. They would then be gradually able to find (or create) for themselves some interesting and useful activity in other fields. We would save precious materials and large quantities of energy now used in arms manufacturing, and as a side effect also the pollution of the environment would be reduced. As it is now, after their manufacture, the weapons and munition either are catching rust somewhere before they are thrown out, or one succeeds to provoke a conflict somewhere so that they can be used at least a little bit, which leads to additional destruction of the results of work of many other people. I know that for example a modern fighter plan is a "miracle of technology", but what else is it good enough for other than for killing and destruction? Its only other use seems to be in acrobatic shows and bringing its pilots a kind of flight ecstasy. And the supersonic planes have so far proved to be unsuitable for civilian use.

I cannot help it, but from the point of view of the whole world, arms development and production and arms industry lead only to enormous waste of the results of human work. Of course, certain groups of people can get (and are getting) rich from it. And whole countries can profit from arms exports when they are selling arms often to various dictatorial regimes whose rules buy them for money extorted from their subjects, who in turn have very low living standard thanks to it. In this way a large imbalance in the wealth of the citizens of different countries is prolonged/perpetuated.

You will certainly not want to claim that a country that produces no weapons at home and at the same time acquires a lot of arms, has any benefits from such an activity. It must pay for the arms with other goods produced domestically that could otherwise have been used for the improvement of the life of local people, who are usually not asked about how the values they produced are to be used.

Intense arms build-up, a large military and all the associated secrecy are also an obstacle in spreading and improving democracy. An army is essentially a nondemocratic organization - in it, next to nothing is decided by voting of all the concerned. Society, in the midst of which there is a large nondemocratic organization, cannot be truly democratic.

If all the means spent in the recent decades on arms race, had been used for peaceful research instead, we might have had a permanent base on the Moon by now, and solved many burning problems of our life on the Earth. You asked what the people who nowadays work in the armaments industry would do after its phasing out. I can see so many things around me that they could, beside an intense space exploration, go into. For example, do away with poverty, illiteracy and diseases that still plague so many people on our planet. Or put large efforts in the search of technologies that have minimal negative impact on the environment. Or build houses for all the people without a roof above their heads.

Technological progress stimulated by the arms races, due to the feeling of urgency accompanying such races, does not care much about the negative side effects. For example, nuclear weapons tests contaminated with radioactivity many places in the USA, Russia, Pacific Ocean, and elsewhere, which will still cause many worries to future generations (and the clean-up of this contamination is another activity which could be taken up immediately by a large percentage of the people freed by closing the arms industry). When doing research the only motivation of which is to help people, one does not have to hurry up, everything can be thought over more thoroughly, and big mistakes can be avoided.

Today's atomic power stations are to a large extent a Greek gift - they are very expensive and so far nobody solved satisfactorily the problem what to do with the nuclear waste. If there were no arms race, the energy consumption would have been much smaller, and maybe there would have been no need so far to build any nuclear stations. Enormous funds spent on their construction and operation could have have been spent instead on further improvement of their technology, on research in more direct transformation of the nuclear energy into the electric one, and on research of nuclear fusion that is expected to be more clean (from the point of view of radiation and waste). At present there is lack of funds devoted to nuclear fusion research, and in some distant future we will definitely need clean nuclear energy.

All the efforts to decrease armaments and the size of militaries naturally have to be coordinated world-wide. They must be accompanied by building of mutual trust between all countries and establishing a system of mutual complete verification of the disarmament process to make it absolutely impossible that a country would be able to unpleasantly surprise others, which is what you were afraid of. It would be a long process. But if the armies really want to ensure a peaceful future for their citizens, they have to devote themselves mainly to decreasing the risk of conflicts, reorient themselves to activities of police type aimed at peace keeping and the liquidation of offensive arsenals, and painstakingly avoid any activity that others could consider to be offensive against them.

In the meantime, I would propose to sign international treaties or the rules of combat that would allow only strictly defensive wars. For example, if a country, in spite of all the above described effort, still attacked its neighbour or neighbours, defense against such aggression would naturally by justified, but it should be limited to chasing the attacker back to its territory, and eventually to destroying remotely its offensive systems so that losses of life are avoided. Perhaps one could also think about the liquidation of the militaristic groups or the leaders of the attacking country, whose responsibility for starting the conflict was proved beyond any doubt (best of all in a regular court proceedings). In the course of any such punishment one should definitely avoid causing damage to uninvolved innocent citizens. If we want to break the cycle of violence, one should not occupy the territory of the attacker, destroy its infrastructure, or to do anything else that would instill prolonged feelings of humiliation and endangerment among its inhabitants (which could lead them to unwanted support for their irresponsible leaders), and thus thwart a fast integration of the country back into the world community (for example, the use of atomic bombs and the subsequent occupation of Japan at the end of WWII was probably not necessary to secure the peace).

Best regards,
          Miroslav Kolár

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P.S. It occurred to me also: Maybe the world evolves by itself toward decreasing the conflicts. Take for example today's Germany where some 150 years ago present day Bundesländer (at that time various small duchies and kingdoms) sometimes still fought among themselves. Today, they are members of a single federation. In the first half of this (20th) century, individual countries of the western Europe also still fought among themselves quite a lot. Today, they are also quite successfully integrated. As various parts of the world do learn more about each other, they cease to fight among themselves. To be able to go killing somebody, one has to see them unambiguously negative, do not know them, be afraid of them. It is much more difficult to go after somebody whom you know quite well.

Arms manufacturers naturally do not like such a process, and are trying as much as they can to spoil it and delay it. The people have to realize it, think about it, and make more and more friends all over the world. Wouldn't it be better if Russian, American, Iraqi and even North-Korean engineers worked together on designing a base on the Moon to be able to use its raw materials, rather than designing, each separately, rockets for mutual destruction as they do now? If able to befriend each other, they will see that they are all more or less the same, and could live together quite well. They would not be able to understand how they could fight each other in the past. To realize the absurdity of wars, it is enough to visit various memorials in various European countries of fallen soldiers from their past mutual wars.

Ladislav Caha replies:

However, as you did, I also have several additional comments.

First of all - In the course of human history, there never elapsed more than 150 years without a major war somewhere (in the 20th century this feat was actually accomplished several times). This proves to me unambiguously that war itself is a part of human nature. And to try to remove it (war as part of human nature) from people? That would be equivalent to trying to remove the deeply rooted Christian faith from the Euro-American society ... Sometimes it even seems to me that some people subordinate everything to this (goal of removing war from human nature). It is not the arms that are responsible for the (current) state of affairs, the people are - it's quite easy to kill essentially with anything (so many people are killed in cars).

Second - To conclude, let me cite "for example the use of atomic bombs and the subsequent occupation of Japan at the end of WWII was probably not necessary to secure the peace." I may not have emphasized it in my first letter, but I am a student of the Military Academy. You may not realize the price that Japan would pay in case that USA invaded the Japanese islands. I dare to say that in such a case several times more people would perish than after dropping two atomic bombs.

It remains to me nothing else but to agree with your postscript. However, I am afraid that ethnic and religious differences will for a long time make impossible this kind of cooperation, and that always somebody will appear who would try to use these differences ...

In Brno, November 29, 1999

My final letter of December 12, 1999:

As for Japan, I agree with that in a classical invasion of Japan more Japanese and also Americans would perish than from two small atomic bombs. But that was not my point at all, I was claiming that it had not been necessary at all to capture and occupy the whole Japan, which would save even more lives. (And without American occupation, Japanese might even have been using Latin alphabet at present - at least at the beginning of the century there were enough supporters for that in Japan, but then during the American occupation they had great fears of forced Americanization which considerably increased clinging to various old cultural symbols, such as their complicated writing system that takes children about 15 years to master.) At present, such approach is finally, thank Heaven, at least half-heartedly adopted (Iraq, Serbia). And maybe also the Russians right now are susceptible to being persuaded not to take the capital of Chechnya by force (would it not be sufficient just to encircle Grozny, and wait for the surrender of terrorists and "terrorists"?) Or one more example from the past: why was it necessary to destroy the treasures of art and architecture of Dresden and with them the lives of one hundred thousand of its inhabitants before the very end of WWII?

You say "that war itself is a part of human nature. And to try to remove it from people?" But aren't for example diseases also a part of human nature? And how hard are we trying to remove them! War in my opinion is also only a disease against which one has to fight. If it were rooted only so little as the Christian faith is (a mere 2000 years), it would not so serious yet.

But a question remains whether war really is so deeply rooted in the majority of people. Or is the war provoked instead only by a minority of people with violent inclinations who then pull with them into the war also the shocked rest of the society? Perhaps in all the previous wars the common man had actually not much choice. According to the laws on the creation of which he had no part (was not allowed to participate), he could choose to either be shot for treason by his own army if he refused to fight, or to go to kill equally hapless enemy soldiers, and hope that he would be lucky enough to survive it. I believe that if before each war all the citizens of the countries involved would be allowed to vote on whether to go to war or not, there would have been much fewer wars. Some time ago, I read in a book the description of the shock that the beginning of WWI had been for the sleepy German middle class. Only a few months before the war, the ordinary citizens would never even dreamed that something like that could happen. They had no appetite whatsoever to go into war. If they could vote on it, there would probably be no WWI. The most recent (1999) bombing of Iraq evidently took place without much discussion, on the basis of a report of a single person - the chief UN weapons inspector - which I think later proved to be not very clear. And also thanks to the personal problems of the American president (Clinton).

And maybe, what you think is a part of human nature is just a trait instilled into the minds of young men over long generations by the very war-mongering minority - to be ready to die for one's king, homeland, etc. (at the beginning of this article the author compares two diametrally different reactions of his students to visiting the Washington memorial of the 58,132 American soldiers fallen in the Vietnam war. To some of the students it still seemed to be the "highest" sacrifice - that those soldiers gave their lives for democracy and the freedom of the USA. The rest were moved by so meaningless taking of so many lives because of pure foolishness of generals and politicians).

And the claim that nothing can be done about the war may be just one of the manifestations of the lack of courage, or perhaps laziness, to think about whether the traditional, inherited approaches to the problem solving cannot be at least gradually improved.

I would not want to deprive the war-loving people of their hobby. However, I do not like when they force the peaceful rest of the society to finance their hobby, and force others to let themselves be killed because of their hobby. If they let me in peace, such war-loving minorities from various countries can happily fight each other in some remote deserts at their own expense, even with live amunition. Or shoot at one another with blinds (as I saw in 1990 amusing themselves in such a way two groups of Japanese young men with complete military equipment - uniforms, machine guns, walkie-talkies, etc. - in a park in a Tokyo suburd - it may be an excellent way how to satisfy once violent urges, which may have contributed to the absolute feeling of safety in the Japanese streets at that time). Or to play war games on computers. Or organize sports tournaments. It would be up to them what they chose.

I am an optimist. I hope that a positive product of globalization will be a world-wide planetary identity. When all the people of the Earth will consider themselves one big "tribe", there will be nobody left to agitate against, and nothing else for the warriors than to play some games.

Yours Miroslav Kolár