Opinion: stop the arms race
Denise Garcia is a professor at Northeastern University. She advises the UN on arms control and military use of artificial intelligence and robotics
The world is facing several existential threats: from climate change and unprecedented biodiversity loss to a devastated world economy and a societally paralysing pandemic. Nonetheless, countries still spend recklessly on destructive arms rather than on reducing risks and threats to all of humanity. Just as the Covid-19 pandemic started, the world hit record-high levels of military expenditure. Almost US$2 trillion were spent on the military in 2019 globally, to which the USA contributed 38 per cent of the share. As the pandemic was progressing apace in late February, the US government presented a new budget proposal for the fiscal year 2021, asking for $740.5 billion for national security, including an updated $28.9 billion to modernise its nuclear arsenal, which will cost up to $2 trillion to maintain for the next 30 years. This national security budget didn’t include or address the actual threats to human security posed by climate change or arising from pandemics.
One consequence of the arms trade is the staggering cost: the economic impact of violence in
2019 was $14.5 trillion. The cost of violence in 2020 was the equivalent of 10.6 per cent of global GDP. The unfathomable part of this is that military expenditure is responsible for the most significant component of the economic impact of violence: about 45 per cent.
War is in decline and there are almost no international wars being waged today. There has also been a decrease in internal conflicts.
None of the challenges that pose existential dangers to nations in the 21st century can be tackled with weapons or solved by one country acting alone. The Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons calculates that the USA spends $35.1 billion annually to maintain nuclear systems in the name of ‘national defence’. This could pay for 300,000 intensive-care beds, 35,000 ventilators, 150,000 nurses and 75,000 doctors every year.
The military burden represents how much a state allocates to the military as a share of its GDP. The USA’s military burden rose by 5.3 per cent in 2019 to 3.4 per cent of its GDP. Germany, which has been more successful in addressing the pandemic, has a military burden of 1.2 per cent, similar to that of New Zealand. Other countries that have also triumphed over the virus, such as Iceland and Costa Rica, have no military burden.
I believe there are four actions that need to be taken urgently to steer the world towards a safer course. First, stop new arms races; the world is already awash with weapons. The major powers, especially the USA, China, Russia, France and the UK, are busy developing (with little or no public scrutiny or oversight) new weapon systems that will use artificial intelligence (AI). I have been a member of the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons, an interdisciplinary group of scientists working on this matter, since 2017. I have testified to the UN, especially on the rise of ‘algorithmic killing’, which refers to weapon systems or machines that operate with increasing levels of autonomy. Many of them are already deployed for battle and gradually incorporate ever more enhanced forms of AI, designed to search, track and target to kill under the control of algorithms and not of human beings. I submit that preparing for algorithmic war will not successfully defend people from the main threats at hand.
Second, respect and abide by the Arms Trade Treaty, which came into force in 2014. The treaty sets out rules for arms transfers that aim to ensure that they respect human rights and the law of war in order to prevent genocide and other unscrupulous behaviour.
Third, acknowledge that the main threat to human security worldwide is the persistent depletion of the planet’s resources associated with the reliance on coal and oil to power economies. The war on these outdated ways of generating energy must be declared now.
And finally, after we emerge from the Covid-19 crisis, countries must transition to a new security regime designed to attain human security for the common good. The operational framework for this is the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), unanimously agreed upon by all nations in 2015. The SDGs offer a concrete road map that will deliver human security for all peoples and bridge the inequalities made so evident by the pandemic. It will cost $5–7 trillion to implement them, but achieving the SDGs would open up $12 trillion in market opportunities, such as green economics, and create almost 400 million jobs.
The economic impact of violence in 2019 reached 10.6 per cent of global GDP. Meanwhile, the cost of implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement would be one per cent of global GDP and implementing the SDGs would amount to five per cent of global GDP. The choice is clear.