Re: [OT]Responsibility and the Merchants of Death

Alan Brain wrote:

> >If someone buys a weapon and later on uses it in a war, is the weapon
> >designer/manufacturer involved in the war too?
>
>"Once the Rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that's not
>my department" - said Wehner Von Braun

:-/

>If they knew there was a reasonable chance the weapons were to be used
>that way, then not just Yes but Hell Yes!

This may be a language problem. In Swedish, "responsible for" is not the

same thing as "involved in" - you can be responsible even if you're not 
involved, and it is possible (though harder) to be involved without
being 
responsible - but I'm not sure whether or not this is the case in
English too.

I carry part of the *responsibility* for those lives taken by our
weapons, 
certainly. For me this is morally acceptable only because I also know 
several people personally, and am aware of many others, who owe their
lives 
to those same weapons.

However, I've seen and heard quite a few comments from USAmericans 
critizising Sweden for not *getting involved* in the Gulf War and more 
recently in Afganistan. They clearly don't count our delivering ~150,000

AT4s to the US armed forces prior to the Gulf War as getting involved
(and 
neither do they count the field hospital we did send there, since it
didn't 
take part in the actual fighting). Some of those AT4s are used in 
Afganistan as I type this, but that too doesn't seem to count as "Sweden

getting involved" to those Americans. And according to my understanding
of 
the word "involved", they're right - even though I usually don't agree
with 
the sentiments behind their comments.

>There is an obverse side to this too: there are many people here in
Australia
>who can remember a certain Swedish firm refusing to supply us with ammo
for
>our Karl Gustavs when we became involved in Vietnam. Every firm has not
just
>the right, but the obligation to ensure its weapons aren't misused.

Agreed. Though knowing both the Swedish popular opinion and politicians
at 
the time and several of our salesmen involved in that incident, I
strongly 
suspect that it was our politicians who stopped the sale rather than our

company. According to Swedish law it is forbidden to export weapons to
any 
country which might actually use them - *unless* the Swedish government 
makes an exception for that particular sale... and unlike our salesmen,
the 
Swedish government at the time was heavily pro-VC/NVA :-(

Unfortunately, a company has very little power to prevent a customer
from 
selling or giving the weapons he has bought to someone else - or even 
having them stolen by someone else. The recent US worries about Stinger 
missiles in Taliban hands is one such case; similarly I know several 
instances where our weapons have turned up in places where we did not 
deliver them. The Swedish army is a big culprit here, BTW - it didn't
guard 
its mobilization weapon caches very well, so criminal elements have
broken 
into several such caches with the result that the MC gangs in southern 
Sweden have used AT4s in their gang wars. Not exactly the purpose we 
designed the AT4 for :-(

>So a buyer should be careful to make sure he only buys from someone
with 
>the same
>beliefs - or from someone who's morally Bankrupt.

Agreed. And he must remember that both the firm he buys from *and* the 
government of that firm's country need to have the same beliefs (or be 
morally bankrupt), since either of them can stop the deliveries.

Later,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."