The Rare bird: 100 armed conflicts since World War II
The Rare bird: 100 armed conflicts since World War II
It may seem hard to believe but the world has witnessed 100 wars and other conflicts since 1945, as the table published on page 23 of this issue shows.
On September 21, 1970, five of the six living, Nobel Peace Prize winners Lord Boyd Orr, Lester Pearson, Philip Noel-Baker, Linus Pauling and René Cassin presented a declaration on peace and disarmament at United Nations headquarters in New York calling for a moratorium on the development and deployment of new offensive and defensive strategic nuclear weapons systems as a first step towards full disarmament. The sixth Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ralph Bunche, endorsed the declaration though he did not sign it because of his position in the U.N. Secretariat as Under Secretary-General.
The United Nations hopes to make the Seventies a "Disarmament Decade" in a renewed effort to halt and reverse the insensate arms race in which the real cost of world military expenditure, trebled between 1949 and 1968.
In this issue, which is largely devoted to the question of armaments and peace research, Nobel Peace Prize winner Philip Noel-Baker presents a picture of the current arms build-up on the basis of the findings of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published in its Yearbook of World Armaments and Disarmament.