Adonis Diaries

Timeline of war hardware inventions and applications (October, 2010)

Dynamite (1867); Explosion motor engine (1870); iron battleship (1880); machine gun (1884); wireless transmission (1905); grenade and vehicle land mines (1914); fighter airplane and fire launchers (1915); tanks (1916); bombers (1917); drone (1930); radar (1935); anti-personal mines (1939); missile (1942); atomic bomb (1943);  reactor planes (1944); bomb A (1945); supersonic jets (1950); helicopter (1950); H-bomb (1952); nuclear reactor submarines (1954); laser (1958); satellite ((1959); nuclear airplane carrier (1964); Strategic Defense Initiative (1983); precision guided missile (1990);  stealth bomber (2000); robot killer (2005).

You realize that sophisticated war hardware invention accelerated its pace during WWI.  Your worries heighten when you discover that after WWII, the time line from invention to application shortened drastically.  It is as powerful States are very anxious to show off the potentials of mass destruction by creating arm conflicts for effective testing of the new arsenals.  Actually, we witnessed 115 armed conflicts after 1945, twice the total number of conflicts in 150 years.  The US, France, England, and Russia annihilated entire islands and destroyed the ecosystem of vast lands just for testing H-bombs.  The effects of underground atomic testings are surfacing now with increased volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tidal waves.

After testing on live hapless developing nations then, barons of military industries and Defense Department start exporting arms to so-called “friendly States”.  Most of these  “friendly States” produce oil and don’t know how to use what they purchased; the military budgets of many States lack allocation to maintaining the sophisticated machines of death; thus, paying for military experts of the superpower State to keeping the hardware combat ready.

The US government exports 50% of the total war hardware sold around the world; ten other States export the remaining 50%.  The US military budget is higher than the military budgets of all the UN recognized States.  Mind you that a single B2 bomber cost the military budget of 120 States; what this bomber is used for?  Mainly if an armed conflict starts with China!

The UN banned the usage of many arms of mass destruction and especially chemical weapons that Germany started in 1916, Japan used in China in 1943, then US used in China in 1950,  in Vietnam for many years (orange gas), and also in Iraq in 2003.  Israel is still using all the banned arms on the Palestinians and the Lebanese such as cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs, Dense Inert Metal Explosive ammunitions…  Tony Blair of England should be facing international court for crimes against humanity but he was recompensed with a peaceful resolution of Palestinian Israeli conflicts:  He delivered the cluster bombs to Israel in the 2006 war against Lebanon.   Lebanon barely cleaned up half the clustered bomb in 5 years and more casualties are witnessed every week:  In Lebanon, hundred have died and thousand permanently injured.

This century witnessed 140 armed conflicts totaling more than 150 millions in direct casualties.  Three times that number suffered permanent disabilities and handicaps physically, mentally, or both.  Thus, one billion of mankind were wasted just in wars.  More than twenty conflict produced over one million killed.  WWI generated about 9 million killed and WWII more than 60 millions.  Two dozen conflicts are still on going for decades and the toll is accumulating.  Mind that in every decade, one billion die of famine and curable diseases.  The UN estimated that currently there is one billion earning less than a dollar per day and have no shelters:  Which means, all the most downtrodden of the billion of mankind will invariably die within the decade of famine and curable diseases.