Ethics, Scientists, Engineers and the Military - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 340

Another depressing story of corruption surrounds the 1985 Al-Yamamah arms
deal between the UK and Saudi Arabia for the supply of a range of military hard-
ware. This included Tornado aircraft, helicopters, tanks and armoured vehicles from
British Aerospace (now BAE Systems) at a cost of over £40 billion with payment
largely in oil (Webb 1998 , 2007 ). Saudi Arabia has a history of serious human rights
violations. Its government was described in a briefi ng prepared by a top UK Ministry
of Defence (MoD) civil servant in 1985 as 'authoritarian and highly undemocratic'
and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA 2007 ) noted that 'workers from
South and Southeast Asia … are subjected to … involuntary servitude, including
being subjected to physical and sexual abuse, non-payment of wages, confi nement…
children [are] traffi cked into Saudi Arabia for forced begging and involuntary
servitude as street vendors'.
A subsequent deal announced at the end of 2005 involved Saudi Arabia purchasing
72 Eurofi ghter Typhoon aircraft, which few other countries were interested in, for
about £5 billion. Other than the project partners, only Austria had agreed to buy
the plane, but had subsequently realised the cost and discovered that a company
controlled by the wife of the Austrian air force chief had received 87,600 from a

lobbyist (Webb 2007 ). Payments by BAE to Saudi princes were on an even larger
scale, with a fund estimated at £60 million for this purpose, including a three-month
holiday alleged to cost £2 million and a £170,000 Rolls-Royce (Webb 2007 ). A then
labour councillor found it 'very embarrassing' that some of the young women he
procured for visiting Saudi pilots came from his area. The Serious Fraud Offi ce
started investigating the Al-Yamamah contract bribery allegations in 2004, but
encountered pressure from the Saudi and UK governments and BAE and the inquiry
was dropped at the end of 2006 (Webb 2007 ).

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6 Case Study of Military Research in UK

The UK had the world's fourth largest military budget of $60.8 billion in 2012,
behind the USA, China and Russia, with military spending per person twice that of
Russia and eight times that of China. Spending per person and per unit GDP is much
greater than the EU average. UK military spending in 2012 was 22% of the EU total
(Parkinson et al. 2013 ), but its GDP was only 18% of the total (Anon 2014j ). It has
the world's third largest arms company, BAE systems, and is the sixth largest arms
exporter (Parkinson et al. 2013 ). Recent recipients of UK arms include Algeria,
Bahrain, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen. However, criticism has been
more vocal following the brutal action by the governments of Libya and Bahrain to
suppress uprisings in 2011 (Committees on Arms Export Controls 2011 ).
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) spends about £15 billion per year on military
technology (Parkinson et al. 2013 ), including £1.8 billion on research and develop-
ment (R&D). This is about a sixth of government R&D spending and a much higher
percentage than in most other industrialised countries (Parkinson 2014 ). Spending
on health R&D is now close to that on military R&D, having increased over the last