On Nagasaki Day, let’s not forget that companies gain from wars

Horror came to the Japanese city of Nagasaki on this day 75 years ago when Bockscar, the US Air Force’s modified B-29 bomber, dropped a nuclear bomb weighing about 10,300 pounds over the city. The bomb, named ‘Fat Man’, produced a 22-kiloton blast which instantly killed 40,000 people, a fifth of the total population of the port city. Most victims were burnt to death. Thousands more died in the following days and years with radiation poisoning and cancer the common causes. Just three days earlier, Enola Gay, another B-29 bomber, had similarly devastated thousands of lives in Hiroshima.

Both bombers were modifications of those manufactured by the Boeing Corporation which is today one of the largest defence contractors in the world, and one among a handful of companies for whom war is lucrative business. They are a part of what has been notoriously dubbed the military-industrial complex.

There is considerable debate about the rightness of the bombings of the two Japanese cities. Most Americans believed then that their country, which suffered the least damage of all the major combatants in the war, was justified in what it did. The Japanese obviously don’t agree. Rationally, nothing should justify the cruelty inflicted on the inhabitants of the city.

What’s beyond doubt is that American industry gained enormously from World War II. It provided almost two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the war, including aircraft, artillery pieces, tanks and trucks. In the four years after it entered the war in 1941, American industrial production doubled in size, besides undergoing a metamorphosis as even non-defence companies such as Chrysler, General Motors and Ford turned to making war equipment. By the end of the war, more than half of all industrial production in the world was happening in the US.

It has been a consistent trend since. In the 75 years since the war ended, the US military industry has gone from strength to strength, with the country’s civilian leaders playing a key role in this. Thus, in May 2017, when US President Donald Trump signed a record $350 billion deal with Saudi Arabia for military equipment, the gainers were companies such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon. Not surprisingly, the stock price of many of these companies goes up every time a potentate talks to White House.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, defence spending, according to consulting firm PwC, fell by about a third in real terms between 1989 and 1996. It was to be a false dawn. The military industrial complex wasn’t having any of it and while consolidating through a series of mergers and acquisitions, the biggest companies, worked behind the scenes to bring peace and prosperity back to the world.

Soon enough normal order was restored as spending started going up again. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the total global military expenditure in 2019 at $1,917 billion was up 3.6 percent over 2018, the largest annual growth in spending since 2010.

What’s terrible is that among the three largest spenders now are two countries, China and India, that till recently struggled to feed their populations. Sadly, data suggests that economic growth almost always leads to increased spending on the military, but not on education and health. The 2.4 percent of its GDP that India spends annually on its military budget goes largely to the big corporations across the globe. Even the order for 36 Raphael fighter jets, which raised a mighty cheer in the country, will ultimately shore up the finances of its French maker Dassault Aviation as it deals with the drying up of its business jets business.

The armament industry is unique in the sense that its customers are governments across the world. A small cohort of companies, no more than a dozen, make their fortunes when countries can’t resolve conflicts peacefully or even when they can drum up imagined threats, as happened with the US invasion of Iraq in search of the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Let’s not forget, ultimately every life lost in battle, every child orphaned by war, adds to the bottom line of a company somewhere.

(Sundeep Khanna is a senior journalist. Views are personal.)