One feature of the Falklands conflict which caused the jingoists to boil over with ill-directed wrath was the fact that some of the armaments used by the Argentine forces had been made in Britain or EEC "partner" countries. Some details are given in a recent New Statesman article by Duncan Campbell, under the extremely confused title of "No Lesson Learnt" (21 June 1981). Campbell tells us how
Ferranti workers in Edinburgh and Manchester made the Isis bombing sights with which the Argentine Skyhawks were fitted . . . Their French counterparts at Bourges made the Exocets. Sterling Armaments of Dagenham sold the Argentines some 100 submachine guns seven years ago, which turned up at Goose Green.
Later in the same article, we learn that Sterling Armaments and Ferranti were among the exhibitors at last month's British Army Equipment Exhibition, a bi-annual international arms sale held at Aldershot. Campbell writes:
In 1976. just three months after we had broken off diplomatic relations . . . two Argentine generals came to Aldershot. In 1978 ten officers came. In 1980. after the restoration of diplomatic links, five generals visited Britain. The Ministry of Defence even paid their air fares . . . Every other military dictatorship from Turkey to the Americas got the same treatment.
Unexpectedly, no reformist cries for "control" appear in the text, although the title does hint at a belief in such "solutions". On a note of unusual realism. Campbell signs off by saying: "There is no sign from Britain or anywhere else in Europe that the Falklands war will have changed the world of arms dealing”.
Those who express patriotic anger at such revelations are probably unaware that history provides many examples of arms sales to the "enemy", and of those not directly involved in a conflict selling the machines of death to both sides. Even in the Middle Ages, mercenary soldiers took whichever side could offer them employment at the time. After the Industrial Revolution, however, the arms trade gathered pace.
Alfred Nobel, like many of the early giants of this business, was a complex character. Idealist, pacifist and admirer of Shelley (in whose style he enjoyed writing poetry), he was also a ruthless financier obsessed with the science of explosives. He is. of course, best known as the originator of the Nobel Peace Prize, a fitting testament to his contradictory nature: fewer people realise that he was one of the earliest to subscribe to the deterrent theory. At the Berne Peace Congress of 1892 he explained his viewpoint to Bertha von Suttner, Austrian aristocrat, authoress and pacifist, who had earlier applied to be his private secretary: “My factories may end war sooner than your Congress. The day when two army corps can destroy each other in one second, all civilised nations will recoil in horror from war” (The Arms Bazaar, Anthony Sampson). Nobel's nightmare vision of destructive power is now all but come to pass, but with no sign of the response for which he apparently hoped. However this philosophy provided an excellent justification for a man who had made his fortune out of the arms race. Sampson believes that Nobel was Bernard Shaw's model for the character of Andrew Undershaft in his play Major Barbara. Undershaft, however, explicitly rejects the deterrent theory when his son-in-law puts his point of view to him: "I am obliged to you for making the usual excuses for my trade, but I’m ashamed of it. I am not one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight compartments". There have been both types in the arms trade. Whether the capitalist provides his own justification or relies on others makes very little difference.
Alfred Krupp was a less complicated person than Nobel. In 1866 he insisted, against the wishes of Bismarck, on exporting guns to Austria, which were very soon in use against Prussia in the Austro- Prussian War. Shortly afterwards, despite having just raised a loan from the King of Prussia. Krupp tried to export his guns to France and failed only because the complacency of the French generals stood in his way. At the turn of the century Sir Basil Zaharoff, in his role as master salesman for Vickers, had considerable success travelling between opposing Balkan states — Greece and Turkey — to escalate orders from both sides. In the First World War the Maxim gun, sold by Sir Hiram Maxim to Germans, Austrians and Italians, was the prototype for the guns which fired from all sides on the Western Front. In Russia, Krupp guns fired on German soldiers and the Belgian army had been stocked from the same source. At sea both sides fired shells with Krupp fuses, and after hostilities ceased Krupp’s successfully sued Vickers for payment of royalties on its shells.
All this nefarious traffic inevitably spawned pressure for control on arms sales and for nationalisation of the industry. Even staunch capitalist defenders of “free enterprise” did not wish to see organisations from within their own territory supplying arms to a potential enemy. Whatever the views of the individuals involved, the development of capitalism led inevitably to attempts by the state machine to interfere with the freedom of the private arms manufacturers to sell to whomsoever their immediate interests dictated. The League of Nations, as ineffective before World War One as the United Nations has been since 1945, passed resolutions such as that of December 1933: “That it is contrary to the public interest that the manufacture and sale of armaments should be for private profit”.
The United States Congress, following the report of the Nye Committee of investigation into the arms business, passed in August 1935 a Neutrality Bill which compelled the President, in the event of war between foreign countries, to apply an arms embargo. The hearings of the Nye Committee were freely quoted by the British Labour Party in support of its demands for nationalisation, yet the ineffectiveness of control “remedies” had already been revealed during the Manchurian crisis of 1931. In that year Japan invaded Manchuria, then part of China, in the face of condemnation from Britain and the League of Nations and a boom in British arms exports to both sides ensued. For a couple of weeks the British government imposed an arms embargo. Duff Cooper, then Financial Secretary to the War Office, described the situation thus: "In a fortnight we took off the embargo, but during those weeks we lost a great many orders. China and Japan did not get less munitions, but men in this country got less work, less food, less employment". Thus Duff Cooper, like Alfred Nobel, used an argument more common today than in his own time. The concern of the capitalist over loss of profit is. with varying degrees of hypocrisy and cynicism, masked as sympathy for the workers thrown onto the streets as a result of unemployment. More recently the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East turmoil in general have provided further examples of duplicity. French pressure in 1969 forced Dassault, previously a generous supplier of Israel, to sell Mirage jets to Libya. Significantly the main reason was the need to ensure continuing supplies of oil.
Why does this destructive absurdity continue? The answer lies in the nature of the capitalist system itself. Unsold stocks of any commodity are a dangerous embarrassment to the owners of the means of wealth production. If the value embodied in these goods cannot be converted into cash, profits are lost and, in some cases, bankruptcy results. In the last resort this desperate pressure to sell in the face of cut-throat competition from rivals drives capitalist governments into war. This pressure of course applies in the final analysis as much to government controlled industries.
Under capitalism alliances between stales are often of a transitory nature. Japan was an ally of Britain and America in 1914-18, but fought against them in 1941-45. And despite the long-standing Falklands dispute, Argentina was not regarded as an enemy until the time of the invasion. Despite recent technological advances in the means of destruction, some comparatively old weapons are still effective, particularly in small scale wars. The Canberra bomber, the design of which started as early as 1945, helped India "liberate” Bangladesh in "Mrs. Gandhi’s War” in 1971. This aeroplane and the Lightning (1960) are much in evidence in South American air forces and are indeed not yet completely phased out of the RAF. The variability of capitalist alliances and the long life of some weapons obviously increase the danger of supplying a potential enemy with the means to hit you hard. Weapons bought with one purpose in mind can easily be put to another use. The guns from Sterling Armaments which turned up seven years later at Goose Green may well have been purchased for domestic rather than "anti-colonial” use. Campbell reports that "five were fitted with silencers, which reduce the performance of the bullets too much for conventional military use”. Probably they were intended for use against workers at home rather than abroad.
There is however yet another reason why, even with government control of arms production, sales opportunities abroad cannot be lightly spurned, even if embarrassment is risked in the process. The capitalist class has the problem of how to maintain in peacetime the capacity to produce armaments in an emergency. To convert too many factories to other products such as kidney machines would clearly put this capability at risk. In February 1935, Bernard Baruch, adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, spelled out his government’s policy with brutal frankness:
The only expedient yet used is for the governments of industrial countries at least not to discourage (and I fear almost universally to encourage) the manufacture of lethal weapons for exportation to belligerent countries actively preparing for war. but which have an insufficient munitions industry or none at all. Without specific evidence 1 still conjecture that the Nye investigation will disclose that our Government has not operated on a different policy. To put it bluntly, this is a method of providing a laboratory to test killing implements and a nucleus for a wartime munitions industry by maintaining an export market for instruments of death. Of course, it is absolutely indefensible and we could not be put in a position of excusing it.
This really says it all.
E. C. Edge
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