THE LAST WORD
The end result of our…..evolution has been the inversion of the meaning of the word armaments. What for thousands of years was a non-productive necessity of warfare has been dressed up as a productive necessity of both job creation and technological innovation. Where the public ownership of arsenals had once given some guarantee that weaponry would relate to defence and attack, the privatization of production puts the requirements of national protection on the back burner. In other words, the only way to reduce expenditures while ensuring the production of the right quantity of the right weapons without international proliferation would be to reverse the current policy: establish a monopoly of state production and openly assume the costs of defence.
John Ralston Saul in The Doubter’s Companion, 1994
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