NEW YORK
"My name is Enrica Capobianco. I am 9 years old and in grade 5. When I grow up I would like to be a loyar. But I am scared because one day a boom might fall on us so I won't get a chance to first be a loyar, second have a family, and third be a teenager."
I winkled this bravely spelled and heartfelt letter off my husband's desk,1 out of a pile of earnest scrawls from the pupils of St. David School in Maple, Ont. The students have been talking about war and peace lately, and are scared of bombs.
Enrica, every sane person is scared. It's scary the way Mikhail Gorbachev's nuclear disarmament proposal, just two weeks ago, has already been entombed by media silence. The General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party suggested that the world abolish all nuclear weapons by year 2000.2 According to the papers here, U.S. officials quickly dismissed the plan as "a blatant effort to gather Western European support." Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger thought the suggestion was "very, very worrisome" because it was linked to a U.S. abandonment of Star Wars.
Since then, nothing. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes at the Geneva arms talks, and I don't know how much to trust Mr. Gorbachev's offer, but isn't there something menacing in this vast, apathetic public yawn?
Perhaps I'm keyed up because I've been reading an electrifying booklet, with the sober title of World Militancy and Social Expenditures 1985, published by World Priorities, a nonprofit research organization in Washington. Normally, I have an aversion to statistics. But this 52-page document is so crisp, so witty, that the numbers turn into electrons that go jolting through your nervous system and straight into your brain.
Consider that since the end of the Second World War, the world's military expenditure adds up to $17-trillion. That's $17,000,000,000,000. "Grotesque," comments the book's author, Ruth Leger Sivard, who used to be chief of the economics division of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Consider that today, between the time you read this newspaper and the moment tonight when you go to bed, 40,000 infants in developing countries will have died. Consider that for the cost of three fighter planes, three million children a year could be inoculated and saved from agonizing death caused by preventable disease. Consider that today, and every day, as you go on with your life, five or six new nuclear weapons will be added to a global stockpile already totalling 50,000.
We all know that the arms race is out of control. We can already kill everybody 12 times over. But driven by mutual hate and paranoia, the two superpowers have spurred a worldwide rampage of militarism. Now the world spends $162 per capita a year on military forces...and 6 cents for peacekeeping. The Third World is warped by it: of the $800-billion spent annually on weapons, 75 per cent is on conventional weapons and a huge amount of that is laid out by Third World countries where the average annual income is less than $300.
Superpowers? Killpower they've got, but strange priorities. Of 142 countries, the United States and the Soviet Union rank fourteenth and fifty-first respectively in infant mortality rates. And all around the world, as fast as we pant and race to keep up with crises, the ranks of the poor, the starving, the homeless, the unemployed, the uneducated, are swelling and swelling.
The book sets out the numbers in such stark and devastating contrast that as you read, you begin to feel as though the arms race is a monstrous tumor growing ever more livid, ever more bloated, as the world on which it battens shrinks and shrivels. It sucks up the dollars, creates inflation and saddles future generations (if any) with staggering debt.
Ms. Sivard's world maps make your skin crawl. The globe is starred, dotted and webbed with radar, satellite spies, destroyers, bases and nuclear installations. Missiles can speed from Western Europe to Moscow in six minutes flat; they can skip over oceans and continents and land within a few hundred feet of target. "What this means for the noncombatant is that the battlefield now surrounds and engulfs him," writes Ms. Sivard. "There is nowhere to hide."
Indeed, how can any of us be safe, when the arms race has gobbled world resources so crazily that half the urban black youths in the United States are unemployed; that there are 40 million abandoned street children in Latin America; that the number of Third World jobless has doubled to half a billion in the past decade?
And look at whose hands we're in. These military geniuses at the Pentagon spend $7,600 for a coffee pot and every year lose or misplace more than $1-billion worth of weaponry. Somewhere in the world there's a major or minor nuclear weapons accident every three months. Soviet missiles in Iraq misfire; one barely missed a local power plant. And cruise missiles, Ms. Sivard points out, in a list called Weapons in Wonderland, have a provocative little flaw: they are not prepared for snow. A snow-covered terrain can fool a cruise missile into travelling to the wrong target.
Ms. Sivard has a dream, too. If the Soviets and Americans agreed to nuclear cutbacks, the projected savings in the next decade would be $2-trillion. Suppose, in the euphoria of that decision, they spent half of it to improve living standards in the Soviet Union and to erase the U.S. deficit. Suppose they spend $100-billion a year on world development. Suppose the nations of the world were invited to participate in a global attack on poverty. Clean air, clear water, food for the children, inoculation, schools, desert reclamation, urban renewal, jobs.
Star Warriors think these dreams are crazy. Obsessed with
hardware, warheads, overkill and mad-scientist space fantasies,
they call themselves hard-nosed realists. Even now, in the wake
of the Challenger tragedy, they think they can make an
infallible nuclear system. One definition of insanity is that
you no longer know what is real.
(text of February 1, 1986 Globe and Mail column by MICHELLE LANDSBERG)
1-THE HUSBAND OF COLUMNIST MS. LANDSBERG IS STEPHEN LEWIS, FORMER ONTARIO PROVINCIAL NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEADER; FORMER CANADIAN AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS; RECENTLY UNICEF DEPUTY DIRECTOR ON A WORLDWIDE BASIS; AS OF JUNE 1, 2001 THE UNITED NATIONS SPECIAL ENVOY FOR AIDS IN AFRICA; AND "VANCOUVER CENTENNIAL PEACE FESTIVAL" PARTICIPANT.
I INCLUDED THE ISSUE OF THE LEWIS DESK IN THE ANNOTATION BECAUSE ON THE SUBJECT OF "DESKS" AND THE LIKE IS WHAT YOU FIND IF YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE.
2-AS I EXPLAINED IN WHAT YOU FIND IF YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE, IN DOING THIS "INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC WORK...ON A DIRECT BASIS" FOR THE WORLD'S CHILDREN TIMES ARISE WHEN I HAVE HAD TO REACT DECISIVELY.
THIS COMPLETELY CLASHED WITH THE PREVAILING CANADIAN AND AMERICAN GOVERNMENT POLICY PRACTICES FOR THE MOST PART SINCE 1978. (BEAR IN MIND THE MAJOR EXCEPTIONS OF THEN-BRITISH COLUMBIA PREMIER BILL VANDER ZALM AND THEN-CANADIAN INTERNATIONAL TRADE MINISTER MS. PAT CARNEY.)
ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THIS, SOUNDING SO TRIVIAL PERHAPS NOW IN HINDSIGHT, WAS THAT WHEN MIKHAIL GORBACHEV WAS PRESIDENT OF THE NOW DEFUNCT SOVIET UNION, I TELEPHONED THE SOVIET EMBASSY IN OTTAWA ABOUT THEIR RESPONSE TO THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION NUCLEAR ARMS REDUCTION PROPOSALS.
I THINK THE COMMENTARY HERE BY MS. LANDESBERG ABOUT THE PRESS REACTION TO THIS SAYS ENOUGH THOUGH IF I GET E-MAIL ABOUT THIS, I WILL DIG THROUGH MY RECORDS AND WILL PREPARE SOMETHING REPRESENTATIVE OF WHAT THEY SENT ME. (THEY SENT ME A PACKAGE OF GORBACHEV SPEECH TEXTS AND THE LIKE.)
DON'T THINK THE WISDOM OF THOMAS JEFFERSON IS PASSÉ
YET IN WHAT YOU ARE ENTITLED TO FROM YOUR GOVERNMENT? LET YOUR
VOICE BE HEARD: TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP
HERE TO SIGN MY GUESTBOOK.