Word: buildups
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sometimes been argued that there is no direct equation between an arms buildup and war. Until recently, the area importing the most arms was neither the Middle East nor Indochina, but the industrial nations of Western Europe?and they have been at peace for nearly three decades. It is also true that brutal combat does not require advanced weapons: the horrors of Europe's Thirty Years War of the 17th century, the U.S. Civil War and World War I testify to that...
...Valle (whose nation has helped trigger the current Latin American weapons buildup) demands: "Let the industrial nations stop their indecent competition in the sale of arms to the Third World nations!" Dr. Dale Tahtinen, assistant director of foreign-and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, agrees. "If countries were left to themselves," says Tahtinen, "they would mostly buy only what they need as they perceive it ... the cheap stuff and not the flashy weapons...
...some military experts, Iran has far more arms than it needs to protect its borders, a fact that worries other Gulf nations. In defense of the buildup, Iranian military officials argue that their country has potentially antagonistic neighbors in the Soviet Union and Iraq and that the country has a particular responsibility to defend and keep open the narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which pass tankers carrying more than half of the West's oil supply...
Latin America is also enmeshed in an arms buildup. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela are sufficiently prosperous to modernize their arsenals. They have purchased frigates and submarines from West Germany and Britain, Mirage fighter-bombers and howitzers from France and jet trainers from Italy. Peru last year startled its neighbors and Washington by turning to Moscow for arms costing about $85 million?some 600 T-54 and T-55 tanks, plus artillery and antiaircraft guns and missiles...
Toward the end of the week some of the urgency of the energy program seemed to diminish as Treasury Secretary William Simon testifying before a Senate subcommittee again emphasized his view that the buildup of petrodollars in the oil-producing nations was not going to be as massive as had been predict ed. Their foreign reserves, said Simon, might reach only $200 billion to $250 billion in 1980, rather than much higher figures that some had forecast. Reacting to higher prices, other countries were buying less oil from the oil states, which in turn were buying more goods and services...