The Price of Progress

“WITH the monstrous weapons man already has, humanity is in danger of being trapped in this world by its moral adolescents. Our knowledge of science has already outstripped our capacity to control it. We have many men of science, too few men of God,” stated General Omar N. Bradley in 1948. He continued: “Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.”

Today, almost 40 years later, his words have even greater meaning. Consider this: If 20th-century progress were measured in dollars spent on arms, 1986 would be a record year. An estimated $900 billion was spent by the nations worldwide on military weapons. That equates to a “historic high of $1.7 million a minute . . . and represents about 6 percent of the world’s gross national product,” reports The Washington Post on an independent study compiled by Ruth Leger Sivard. The Worldwatch Institute noted that arms spending has put “guns ahead of bread in world commerce” and added that the estimated 500,000 scientists throughout the world committed to weapons research exceeded “the combined spending on developing new energy technologies, improving human health, raising agricultural productivity and controlling pollution.” Interestingly, military spending by the superpowers has produced sufficient weapons to kill their populations off perhaps ten times over.

Clearly, the stockpiling of arms has not removed the host of ills plaguing mankind, nor has it brought man any closer to peace. Instead, as General Bradley explained years ago: “We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. This is our 20th century’s claim to distinction and to progress.”