News of yet another contract for Paveway IV bombs awarded by the UK Ministry of Defence to Raytheon UK’s Paveway team (including Brighton’s EDO MBM ) may well provide work for a few around the country, but it is won at the inevitable cost of human lives around the world.
This latest £25 million contract follows a £60 million replenishment contract for the same bomb earlier this year at a time when UK social welfare provisions and real wages are being frozen, cut and attacked, and financial support for the homeless and vulnerable in our communities is being withdrawn.
This public money could be used to provide EDO’s precision engineers with constructive work that benefits us all and not just American arms corporations, their ex-military boards of directors, and their corporate shareholders. The development and production of these weapons systems will only lead to more civilian deaths in Afghanistan and further waste our public resources on wars that only benefit those who seek to profit from hate and death.
National security does not depend on dropping more 500lb bombs and committing more acts of rapacious international aggression, but rather on the investment in mutual understanding through education, cultural dialogue, political diplomacy and accountability for western war crimes, which have been carried out with impunity for decades due to the threat of economic and military revenge. Human security must be put before the interests of arms corporations, international political elites and their imperial ambitions of global military and economic domination.
Smash EDO will continue to resist this obscene misuse of public resources.