Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
nuclear and conventional armaments and whatever biological and chemical weapons
have not yet been destroyed.
However, despite the devastating nature of existing military technology and its
great diversity from small arms to nuclear-armed and power submarines and the
enormous stockpiles of both nuclear and conventional weapons and military
technologies, research and development work on new weapons systems is still
underway. In addition, many scientists and engineers work on the production and
maintenance of existing weapons systems.
This chapter will consider these and related ethical issues. It has eight sections,
with the last section comprising discussion and conclusions. Section 2 presents
some of the statistics on global military expenditure, types and prevalence of con-
fl icts and the resulting deaths. Section 3 presents a three-part model of the causes of
confl ict developed by the author (Hersh 2013 ) and discusses different approaches to
security and confl ict avoidance. Section 4 considers military hardware, including
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, armed drones and cyberweapons.
Section 4.5 presents some of the arms control agreements. Section 5 discusses the
arms trade, including its volume and the associated corruption. Section 6 presents a
brief case study of the military research links of UK universities and discusses some
of the associated ethical issues. Section 7 discusses the impacts of military spending
on the economy.
2
Global Military Expenditure and Its Consequences:
Some Depressing Statistics
Global military expenditure remains at high levels despite reductions in some
countries due to austerity measures. The value of global military expenditure peaked
in the cold war and has subsequently gone up and down, as follows:
1. Increases leading to a peak in 1987 as a result of the cold war build-up (SIPRI
2001 ).
2. A drop in real terms between 1987 and 1997.
3. Increases from 1998, with the maximum rate of annual increase of, on average,
5% between 2001 and 2009.
4. A slowing down in rates of growth with an insignifi cant increase of only 0.3% in
2011 due to reductions in military expenditures in many countries as a result of
austerity measures.
5. A 0.4% real terms reduction in military expenditure in 2012, the fi rst real
reduction since 1998 (Perlo-Freeman et al. 2013 ) .
Despite austerity measures in some countries, total military spending remained
very high at about $1,756 billion in 2012 (Perlo-Freeman 2013a ). In addition, Africa
(other than sub-Saharan Africa), Asia and Eastern Europe, particularly Russia,
increased their spending in 2011 and 2012, and a shift in military spending from the
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