374 Chapter TenTable 3. Military Expenditures at Constant Prices
(In billions, 1978 dollars)
1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980
USA 39.5 98.2 100.0 107.2 130.9 101.2 111.2
NATO total 67.3 142.6 150.3 168.1 194.0 184.9 193.9
USSR 37.7 51.2 48.0 65.9 92.5 99.8 107.3
Warsaw Pact 40.7 54.2 51.3 71.3 100.8 110.3 119.5
Uncommitted states 25.7 29.6 34.6 57.9 85.7 123.7 141.9
World total 133.7 226.4 236.2 297.3 380.5 418.9 455.3
Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Yearbook 1981, Appendix
6A, p. 156.costs to a common dollar denominator. Nevertheless, whatever dis
tortions survive these more or less neutral Swedish efforts to get at the
truth, it remains indubitable that superpower military spending had its
counterpart among other governments. Indeed, the rate of increase in
military spending by Third World countries in the 1970s exceeded the
growth rate of great power expenditures.
The arms race thus proved contagious, affecting all parts of the
earth. An especial peak (or depth?) may be discerned in the Middle
East, where oil revenues and unstable regimes overlapped the Arab-
Israeli and other apparently irreconcilable local conflicts. As a recipe
for disaster, developments since 1947 in the Middle East were hard to
equal, though bloodshed in southeast Asia was greater, while race and
tribal wars in Africa were restrained more by poverty and a resulting
shortage of highly lethal weapons than by any sort of prudence.
The two superpowers were in a poor position to control the situa
tion. In the 1960s, if not before, the American and Russian govern
ments realized that even after a successful surprise atomic attack,
awesome retaliation would follow. Their new power to destroy
therefore ceased to be a practicable instrument of policy. Other gov
ernments soon saw the same thing and felt freer than before to defy
the USA and the USSR. The French withdrawal from NATO in 1966
and a growing restiveness in eastern Europe registered this fact. As the
capacity for mutual destruction became more and more assured, the
two superpowers were in danger of becoming a pair of Goliaths, ham
pered by the very formidability of their weaponry. Paradoxically
helpless, they were as unable to use atomic warheads as to do without
them.
Such a situation, transmuting unimaginable power into its opposite
at the wave of a wand, was without historical precedent. Yet it oc