Explosive issues

In between following the political and diplomatic progress of disarmament processes like those related to cluster munitions, small arms, the arms trade and nuclear weapons, Disarmament Insight posts have also looked at some broader issues. Last week in 'The Use of Weapons' I discussed aspects of David Edgerton's book, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 - focusing on Edgerton's analysis of Second World War technologies like strategic bombing, atomic weapons and the V2 rocket and implications for today.

One nice thing about blogging is that you sometimes receive feedback about your posts. For instance, our site offers a comment function (see the link at the foot of each post) on which readers can post their remarks or questions.

Last week a chap named Ward Wilson contacted Disarmament Insight. Ward wrote an article in International Security journal last year on "The Winning Weapon? Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima" - an interesting analysis that re-examines the widely-held presumption (which I also touched on my blog post) that nuclear weapons played a decisive role in winning the war in the Pacific. I'd been unaware of Ward's article, and it appears he was unaware of Edgerton's book until reading our blog, so it seems we're all better off.

Ward, it seems, is quite a busy guy, as he too has a blog, entitled 'Rethinking Nuclear Weapons', which is worth checking out. Ward says it's part of a project "to explore the practical realities of nuclear weapons".

In addition, Ward's also just been awarded the Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Challenge Essay Contest's Grand Prize for a piece he wrote entitled "The Myth of Deterrence". This is a big deal. Hopefully Ward's article will be available somewhere online soon. In the meantime, congratulations and well done to him.

Someone else out there on the World Wide Web doing some hard thinking about questions related to aspects of armed violence is Richard Moyes, Policy & Research Manager at the British NGO Landmine Action. Richard has just started a new blog entitled 'Explosive Violence' that examines news reports and issues related to the use of explosive weapons in crime and conflict.

Throughout the twentieth and early twentieth centuries we've seen the boundaries between the use of force in the battlefield and in civilian areas increasingly blurred, whether you think of strategic bombing in the Second World War or South East Asia, or suicide bombing. And what was nuclear deterrence during the Cold War if not the threat to unleash massive quantities of explosive force in populated areas, no matter how strategic planners tried to dignify it?

Recent efforts, like the new Convention on Cluster Munitions, are doing something about this as regards certain specific weapon types, and the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons has tried and is trying - with varying success - to tackle this in its own manner. The use of explosive force in populated areas is an elephant in the room in both multilateral disarmament and arms control and in international humanitarian law efforts and its logical that greater efforts are made to consider what the implications of that are.

So good luck to both Ward and Richard, and we look forward to reading their future thoughts on aspects of these issues and more.

John Borrie


Reference

Wilson, Ward. "The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima." International Security 31 4 (Spring 2007): 162-179.

Picture: 'Explosive!' by Lili Vieira de Carvalho downloaded from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

The use of weapons

On 30 June I discussed technology historian David Edgerton's thought provoking book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, especially the relevance of use-centred accounts of technological development and 'creole technology'.

Edgerton's work also challenges conventional wisdom as to the significance of certain technologies. Among the examples he discusses are World War Two technologies we're accustomed to thinking as central to eventual Allied victory - strategic bombing and the first use of atomic weapons.

During the war, British air commanders such as Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris claimed that continued area bombing of targets in German-occupied Europe were devastating. However, a United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) found a wide range of evidence to contradict this after the war had ended. In contrast, the USSBS's assessment of the American bombing of Japan - which overall was much less heavy in terms of tonnage of bombs dropped - was that it did similar damage "because the bombs were more concentrated in time and more accurately delivered".

These are not new facts, but they're often overlooked. One obvious lesson is that technologies in themselves don't ensure success in war, especially if the adversary has time to respond and adapt, as the Third Reich did to several years of area bombing. While of course this had its costs, area bombing also had costs for the Allies. In 1940 there weren't many other options for an isolated Britain to take the offensive than to bomb what it could hit with its air force (that is, cities rather than the precision targets the RAF thought it could strike in planning before the war). But later in the war there were more options, yet the UK was heavily invested in its bombing strategy by then and found it hard to change, except for limited periods (like the run-up to D-Day). It's worth recalling that Stalin never doubted that the opening of a Western land offensive - not area bombing - was the only way to relieve the military pressure on the Soviet Union. The terrible fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945 immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five occurred in part because the Allies wanted to demonstrate to the Soviets that their air power was of some use.

Assessments of the usefulness (the utility) of a given technology have to be made against the most effective alternatives, not simply the absence of them. The USSBS compared conventional and atomic bombing in Japan in terms of resources required to achieve equivalent effects - that is, death and damage caused. While the total destructive power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs was great, a lot of the energy was not directed at the target. Edgerton explains that "What the report was suggesting was that an atomic raid did the same sort of damage as a standard large conventional one, a few per cent at most of the destruction meted out to Japan from the air."

However morally distasteful such calculations may strike us, they are illuminating. Edgerton points out that the American atomic bombs were products of an industrial effort costing just under US$2 billion (or $20 billion in 1996 dollars). At the time, it cost around $3 billion to construct the 4,000 or so B-29s used exclusively in long distance operations against Japan, including to drop the atomic bombs:

"One billion dollars to destroy a city which would have been destroyed at minimal additional cost by one [large] conventional raid represented an awful lot of 'bucks per bang' ... In other words, by reducing the conventional material available [since resources are finite], the atomic programme, it could be argued, lengthened the war and this cost lives. That we do not see this is partly the result of a carefully fabricated myth put about after the war, that the bomb brought the war to a quick end and saved no fewer than 1 million US lives. This myth depended on the dubious counterfactual argument that the Japanese would have fought on and on had they not suffered atomic bombing, and that the only other way of defeating them involved an invasion that would have cost 1 million lives. In other words, this argument assumed that blockade and conventional bombing were ineffective by comparison with the atomic bomb."

Yet, based on USSBS and other data, blockade and conventional bombing clearly did have profound effects on Japan's war-making capacity. It means that, in 1945, arguments for the efficacy of atomic weapons compared with other means at the time were doubtful - they were not thought to be the war-winners we may consider them to be in hindsight.

And post hoc rationalization remains strong about huge weapons programmes like the Manhattan Project. Moreover, the post-war American atomic programme, including bombers and missiles, cost nearly US$6,000 billion in 1996 prices according to Edgerton - roughly one-third of all defence expenditure and just under the total spent on social security by the United States. These programmes were regarded as crucial tools of national defence and might. Yet, Edgerton further point out:

"Had the [Second World] War extirpated militarism from the world and had the development of weapons stopped, the rocket and the A-bomb would not have been seen as harbingers of the future, but more likely as the last dreadful examples of the irrationality of war and military technology."

In Nazi Germany the V-2 rocket is - notoriously - believed by some historians to be responsible for killing twice as many people involved in its production (mainly due to starvation) as were killed at the receiving end of the weapon. At a cost of one-quarter of the American atomic bomb programme, the German military could have had thousands of fighter planes, tanks, motorized vehicles and artillery pieces it desperately needed late in the war. The Nazis's own pursuit of a military technology oblivious to the alternatives sapped its strength - testimony indeed to the need to be aware of the relative costs of different technologies.

Moral arguments for nuclear disarmament or those based on the costs to civlians are - despite their importance - often pooh-poohed by the so-called realists. So whatever one feels about the rightness or not of the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945, Edgerton's type of analysis seems highly relevant. At a time now when new uses are being sought for existing nukes and new nuclear weapons are being proposed for development, such resources are desperately needed for pressing global problems of massive significance like global warming and sustainable development.

John Borrie


Reference

David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Picture taken of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, from Wikipedia.

The shock of the old

During a hiking trip last week I began reading David Edgerton's thought provoking book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. Edgerton is a technology historian at London's Imperial College. He argues that too many analyses of technological development over-emphasize innovation - and with it connotations of progress in technology from 'low' to high' - and miss the point that it's use of technology that's more salient.

If we think of the important technological developments over the last century from a innovation perspective, Edgerton says, we tend to get a list of boys' toys, for instance, the car, the airplane, the rocket, atomic technology, the digital PC and the internet. But if we look at these from a use perspective we get a different picture. In poorer parts of the world, few technologies on the list above would feature as pivotal. Instead, technologies like asbestos-concrete (still in very widespread use, despite being phased out in rich countries because of health concerns) and corrugated iron feature prominently in most places you go.

And Edgerton offers some fascinating examples of how technological development isn't necessarily linear. Recently the Concorde supersonic airliner, designed and built in the 1960s, was taken out of service leaving only slower, subsonic alternatives. Meanwhile, in Ghana there are huge shanty town magazines in which thousands of people live and work to continually repair and maintain ancient Peugeot taxis, Bedford vans and buses using the most low-tech of available tools and materials. Many vehicles in these environments have reached a state of equilibrium, in which - necessity truly being the mother of invention - they are perpetually maintained, although in very different ways from their original manufacturers' specifications and intentions. Indeed, newer vehicles are often spurned, since the complexity of modern automobiles and dependence on sophisticated components and electronics make them impossible to maintain in such environments.

Meanwhile, parts of the poor world have vaulted over technologies that in richer societies are still familiar. Telephone land lines are too expensive to install in shanty towns in many parts of Africa: mobile infrastructure is cheaper and easier to build and maintain. The locals who can afford it use mobile phones. In Kenya a few years ago, I saw people in the country-side going to vendors by the side of the road who for a small sum would recharge their mobile phone from a contraption based on a car battery, since there was no mains electricity supply. Mixing the old with the new like this are what Edgerton describes as 'creole technologies'.

It seems to me that the Kalashnikov automatic rifle has become a rather creole technology, having escaped the control and imagination of its creators, and a notorious and lethal one at that. It is the embodiment of the phenomenon that the "old will survive alongside the new and sometimes outlast it". Designed in 1947 in the Soviet Union, the Kalashnikov became the Soviet Army's standard issue automatic rifle two years later. Exported all over the world during the Cold War by the million, the AK-47 and its variants became 20th century icons of communist struggle and revolution, famed for their durability and simplicity. Edgerton says that estimates of Kalashnikov production range from 70 to 100 million made since 1947, out of an estimated total production of automatic rifles between 1945 and 1995 of 90-122 million:

"The post-Second World War assault rifles, which could fire powerful bursts of lead, and not just single shots, hugely increased the firepower of small infantry formations. The cost to civilians in war zones has been enormous. With such weapons it was easy to massacre the inhabitants of a village, as US troops did in Vietnam over and over again. Conflicts between people which might have left a few dead were now likely to kill many more. Not surprisingly, th spread of automatic assault rifles to Africa in particular has become a huge source for concern."

As its 61st birthday approaches, the AK-47 and its ilk are still killing. The spread of weapons like Kalashnikov are serious and destabilising enough. But like the proverbial 'grandfather's axe' (continually having parts replaced), such cheap and lethal weapons could be kept going in the field indefinitely once out there. The automatic rifle, Edgerton argues, "was the weapon that civilianised war much more so than the aeroplane or the gas chamber".

Therefore, it seems that if we're serious about combating the deleterious human consequences of the use of illicit weapons, there needs to be thought beyond just curbing the illicit trade. Closer control over ammunition seems an obvious starting point. It's much more difficult and capital intensive to produce reliable ammunition than it is to keep Kalashnikovs going. And, of course, guns are just fancy clubs without bullets. This is indeed something UN groups of experts have looked at and - as such groups do - produced various reports on. But real action has been thwarted for political reasons. More needs to be done.

John Borrie


References

David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2007.

Christophe Carle, 'Small arms ammunition: light at the end of the barrel?', Disarmament Forum, 2006: 1, pp. 49-54.