World Military Expenditures U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 48 500 SU XL 399011 Library of Congress Numbers: JX 1974.A1U52 78-645925 ISSN 0897-4667 Released February 1995 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Washington, DC 20402 ISBN 0-16-045526-X This 23rd edition of World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (WMEAT) updates the statistics, adding data for 1992 and 1993. Some of the findings are encouraging. Global military spending has returned to the level of the mid-1960's and the global arms trade, to that of the early 1970's. Military burden indicators in some regions have reached new lows. These findings give us no grounds for complacency, however. The positive trends so far owe much to the collapse of the Soviet empire and to the economic disorientation that has followed. These developments have brought down military indicators on a worldwide aggregate basis, but not in all regions and groupings of countries. Military spending by the world's developing countries as a whole, for example, has not yet departed a plateau first ascended in the mid-1970's, although there has been some decline overall and some welcome reductions in particular regions. A number of factors-including release of nationalist feelings, economic recovery in the transitioning economies, persisting old and burgeoning new conflicts, the tendency to rely on new military technology as a means to help solve political issues-suggest that a future revival of the arms trade and military power aggrandizement in some parts of the world are not out of the question. This report's findings of generally slackened military efforts in the present period do suggest that it may be a unique historical opportunity, one that we should take advantage of to enhance international security by strengthening and enlarging initiatives that focus on arms control, nonproliferation, and other nonmilitary security-promoting tools. John D. Holun |