Sir, - In his defence of NATO, G.T. Dempsey (June 8th), says that the interests of armaments companies are subordinate to political decisions i.e., that commercial considerations do not drive government policy in this area. Arms dealers such as the Hinduja brothers clearly do not agree or else they would not waste their time lavishing gifts and hospitality on elected politicians such as Peter Mandelson. Or, to take the example of recent French experience, a company interested in selling weapons abroad would hardly bother hiring the foreign minister's mistress as a consultant.
In reality, the massive military "upgrading" being carried out by new NATO members represents a bonanza for arms companies, an influence on policy that is openly acknowledged by an academic commentator, Stefan Wolff, who is himself supportive of NATO expansion: "The United States saw the accession of new members to NATO as more markets for its armaments industries, which, like NATO in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism, now otherwise seemed superfluous".
The chairman of the Committee to Expand NATO, a US advocacy organisation, is, not surprisingly, also the chairman of the arms company Lockheed.
NATO policy is, in other words, at least partly subordinated to the imperative, as Fintan O'Toole has put it, of discovering "new ways to justify the expenditure of trillions of dollars a year on defence". This can come at the expense of safety for the users of these weapons, even leaving aside the damage inflicted on those at the receiving end. Francis Wheen of the Guard- ian has put the matter succinctly in relation to one specific US aircraft that caused the deaths of its users on two occasions: "The Pentagon pressed ahead with production, preferring to jeopardise the lives of its marines rather than incur the wrath of the contractors."
The Irish people's rejection of the Nice Treaty was partly based on rejection of the militarisation of the European Union and of emerging Irish links with NATO. The rejection was based not on confusion or misinformation, but on a valid identification of issues such as the extent to which militarisation is driven by commercial greed. What is needed now is for the Government to revise its security policy in a way that reflects the people's desires and rejects commercially driven militarism. - Yours, etc.,
Andy Storey, Afri, Grand Canal House, Lower Rathmines Road, Dublin 6.