Swords into plowshares: military conversion for the 1990s

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 1994 by Judith Braffman-Miller

The American government has military pacts with 42 other nations, plus executive agreements, treaties, arms sales accords, military associations, and alliances with almost 100 countries. The U.S. generates about 56% of the world's arms trade. This is big business, providing huge profits for a few, while inflicting suffering on many. For example, in the late 1980s, the yearly budget for training military personnel in the US. was more than twice what it would take to educate 300,000,000 school-aged children in Southeast Asia.

The world of the 1990s is not that of the 1980s. The first of the post-Cold War presidents, of necessity, will be different from the last of the Cold War presidents. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the bipolar division of the past half-century collapsed and other structures most people believed unchangeable have vanished. The ideas and values that were the foundation of international relations since the end of World War II became obsolete. When the Cold War ended in 1991, an entire era in international relations came to a close.

Now, according to Columbia's Melman, "After enduring a warlike economy for almost half a century, the American people need to plan for economic conversion."