ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 29, 1995 TAG: 9512290092
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
HERE'S ONE resolution that, if acted on, would add appreciably to worldwide security in the new year: Spend less on the military.
Right now, the globe's governments spend more than $850 billion annually to support military forces that include more than 27 million soldiers. About $270 billion is spent by the United States on its defense budget.
Everywhere - but nowhere more painfully than in developing nations that buy many of their arms from the United States and other industrialized countries - military spending comes at the expense of investments more likely to promote security.
For example, 900 million people in the Third World are unable to read or write, yet their governments spend more on arms and soldiers than on education. Two million children die every year from preventable diseases, while their countries spend more than twice on military forces what they spend on health care.
Big-time funding for generals also sustains their power in developing nations, complicating progress toward civilian, democratic government.
To be sure, military spending has come down since the end of the Cold War. Most of the declines occurred, however, in former Warsaw Pact nations. The world cries out for it to come down further, much further.
That's why government leaders should pay attention to a campaign, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Costa Rica president Oscar Arias, to promote organized talks on concerted, synchronized, international reductions in military expenditures.
Among the good ideas proposed in the campaign: to condition foreign aid and debt-forgiveness on recipient nations' demilitarization efforts, and to negotiate a code of conduct among arms-exporting countries that would bar arms transfers to nondemocratic nations or to warring countries violating international law.
Just think what we could do with the savings.
LENGTH: Short : 42 linesby CNB