World arms bill is £600,000 a minute
Socialist Republic1983Sue CorriganNo public scan is online for this item; the text below was read from a privately held copy.
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THE WORLD is now spending £300,000 million a year on arms.
Half of one hundredth of this amount would go a long way to Providing all the farm equipment needed by low-income countries to be abl; to feed their people adequately. (570 million people in the world areundernourished.)
Ihe other half per cent could pay for providing everyone in the world wit) clean water by 1990.
for the price of one tank, 1,000 classrooms for 30,000 children could be jrovided in developing countries. (250 million children do not attend schol.)
‘he cost of one Polaris submarine would pay for 23 hospitals with 3,60 beds. (1,500 million people have little or no access to medical serices.)
br $300 million, spent over 10 years, the World Health Oranisation virtually eradicated smallpox from the world. This is rouhly the cost of one strategic bomber.
‘he major powers and Western Europe are not the only countries smten with arms madness — a survey of ten Asian countries* showed ths between 1975 and 1979, of each dollar they spent, on avera, > 40 cers Went on arms, 12 cents on education and only four cents on heth.
Burma, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Ke, Sri Lanka, Thailand.) nam war has been their inability to convince their own working class to go along with US military intervention Opinion polls in the United States show that over 60 per cent of the population is opposed to US involvement in war anywhere in the world. It is this ‘popular opposition’ to war that imperialism needs to break, For anti-imperialists in Ireland developing solidarity with the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed in other countries is the best contribution we can make to opposing the nuclear war threat.