Arms Production

The export of arms also seeks to ally balance-of-payments problems, including those that arms production itself generates. Arguments justifying such arms production in terms of "national security" abound, of course, but they are frequently belied by the resulting dependence on the metropolitan producers and their governments, which reserve the right to veto the use and sale of these arms and can enforce this veto by suddenly cutting off the vital flow of supplies, components, spare parts, and so on. Pakistan, India, and Israel, for example, have in recent years found their ability to use or dispose of arms built with foreign licenses or components compromised by such vetoes. This dependence, then, affects not only the use of the specific armaments concerned, but extends to other aspects of foreign and domestic policy. In a sense, these armaments industries are hostages that make their manufacturers most vulnerable to blackmail precisely when these arms are most needed for" national security."

The ideological defense of military expenditures -- as well as a host of other measures -- through the appeal to "national security" obscures much more concrete and immediate economic and political interests.

It is persuasively arguable -- and in some cases, e.g. India and Israel, demonstrable -- that anus production is demanded by the vested economic and political interests of capital accumulation through the capital goods and exports sectors. This is, of course, especially the case when domestic civilian demand is -- as both an instrument and a consequence of this same accumulation model -- insufficient to permit the full or even adequate utilization of installed capacity in steel and other industries or to permit sufficient profits in some manufacturing sectors. As a result of this kind of accumulation crisis, public expenditures on domestic arms production, whether directly by private enterprise or by state-owned enterprises that purchase inputs from the private sector, are a welcome source of demand, insistently promoted by precisely those industrial interests with economic and political influence in the state. They, and their spokesmen in the press and elsewhere, become the loudest defenders of "national security." This political-economic demand extends, where possible, to nuclear power and the atomic bomb, the most capital-intensive industry and armament of all. Here -- and not in threats from Pakistan or even China, from Argentina, or from the African front states -lies the explanation for the Indian atomic bomb and the Brazilian and South African plans to build one, and the Pakistani and Argentine plans to follow suit..)