Challenging the “ Merchants of Death”

The critique of the prewar arms race came not just from pacifists but from senior government officials. The former British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey wrote, “Great armaments lead inevitably to war.” Admiral of the Fleet Lord Wester Wemyss said in a memorandum to the Admiralty in 1919: “Every firm engaged in the production of armaments and munitions . . . naturally wants the largest output” and has a direct interest in the inflation of the Navy and Army Estimates and in war scares . . . So long as this subterranean conspiracy against peace is allowed to continue, the possibility of any serious concerted reduction of armaments will be remote.

Lord Welby, Britain’s Principal Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, was especially harsh in condemning the arms complex to the House of Commons in March of 1914: “We are in the hands of an organisation of crooks. They are politicians, generals, manufacturers of armaments and journalists. All of them are anxious for unlimited expenditure, and go on inventing scares to terrify the public.” The same sentiment was expressed more than a decade later by President Franklin Roosevelt in a 1934 message to Congress: The peoples of many countries are being taxed to the point of poverty and starvation . . . to enable government to engage in a mad race in armaments . . . This grave menace to the peace of the world is due in no small measure to the uncontrolled activities of the manufacturers and merchants of engines of destruction.

Such condemnation of arms manufacturers was reinforced in the early 1920s by a League of Nations inquiry into the origins of the war. The League report confirmed that private weapons firms had “fomented war scares, bribed government officials, and circulated false, inflammatory reports on various nations’ military strength, to stimulate arms spending.” Animosity against the arms industry was raised further in the 1930s by the Nye Committee hearings in the US Senate and the report of the Royal Commission in Great Britain in 1935, which provided further evidence of profiteering, bribery, and price fixing. These reports convinced many that the war benefited only the arms manufacturers. They deepened an already pervasive public distrust of the motivations for war.