World Government

There many topics I could write a post about.  In a lot of cases I don't know enough about the subject to say anything useful.  In other cases the perspective I would bring is similar to one that many others are already presenting.  I try to avoid chiming in with a "me too" in these cases.  This leaves situations where I think I can come at an issue from a perspective that is rare completely missing elsewhere.  This constitutes the bulk of my posts.  Then there is the case where literally no one is talking about something but where I think they should be.  That's the case with the subject of this post.

The right spends a great deal of time decrying political correctness.  Implicit in their argument is that this is something that only the left does and also that it is always a bad thing.  But the right has its own forms of political correctness that it attempts to rigidly enforce on all of us.  They have actually had considerable success at this.  A classic example of this is the word Socialism.

For many years the right succeeded in branding this concept as so bad on its face that it was not to be discussed in public by civilized people.  They were so successful that the idea of Socialism has been completely absent from the public discourse for at least a decade.  Anyone, they claimed, who characterized Socialism as anything but a swear word was obviously a bad person.  Therefore anything that person might have to say should be (and for a long time was) completely ignored.  Bernie Sanders has done us all a good turn by resurrecting the word Socialism.  He has reintroducing it as something that can be spoken of in polite company.  He has even gone so far as to convince many people that many Socialist ideas are actually good ideas.

But so far no one has performed the same service with respect to another idea.  Conservatives have successfully shut down the possibility of any kind of serious discussion of the idea that forming a single world government might be a good idea.  This idea has been out of fashion for quite some time.  And the recent BREXIT vote, the vote in the United Kingdom to exit the European Union, is seen by many as proof that the world should move away from rather than toward such a thing.

I read a lot of Science Fiction.  A lot of it takes it as a given that a world government would eventually evolve on Earth.  This idea persists in Science Fiction to this day.  But the conservative political correctness drive on this subject has been so successful that discussion of it is now found almost nowhere else.  I think that is a sad state of affairs.  So I am going to discuss it here.  Some kind of stab at a world government has popped up in various places in history.  That's where I am going to start.

For a long time and in most parts of the world what we had was the "Alexander the Great" model.  From time to time some single specific individual would conquer an unusually large area.  But the empire thus created tended to fall apart soon after the death of the "great leader".  Genghis Kahn is another example of this sort of thing.  But to be honest, regardless of how great the size of territory conquered appeared to people of the time, it still amounted to only a small portion of the then known world and an even smaller portion of the actual world.

And there is a good and sound reason for this.  Transportation systems, whether we are talking about people or information, were not able to function quickly enough or effectively enough to permit a single unified government to control large areas.  You can't impose your will if you can't get the word out and send the people to enforce your will far enough and fast enough.  You have to be able to identify rebellious behavior in a timely manner.  You then have to be able to move fast enough with enough resource to force people back into line.  If you don't things get out of hand and that's the beginning of the end.  But there were governments that were able to control relatively large areas for relatively long periods of time.  One of them was China.  So what was the trick?

Alexander and Genghis were each single individuals.  At first blush it would seem that the Chinese system worked the same way.  Didn't they depend on a single equivalent individual, the Emperor?  But Emperors tended to come and go.  Some were good and some were bad but through it all the Middle Kingdom endured.  And the reason was that the Emperor was not that important to the continuation of the system.

China endured because they depended on a cultural system rather than on individual leaders, great or otherwise.  Early on China developed a large bureaucracy that did the actual work of governance.  To qualify to become a government bureaucrat you had to pass a rigorous examination.  This acted as a filter.  You had to have a reasonable level of intelligence and a serious work ethic in order to master the material.  You also had to prove that you thoroughly understood Confucian philosophy, a philosophy that had a large and important ethical component.  This did not filter out all the frauds and crooks but, all in all, it worked very well for a very long time.   It could perhaps have worked for even longer if China had not been subjected to severe pressure by Europeans.

Bureaucrats that were well trained in the Confucian system fanned out over China to do the actual business of governance.  Almost all decisions were made locally.  This eliminated the delays inherent in the poor and slow communications possible at the time.  The training necessary to pass the examination guaranteed that the world view and governing philosophy of these bureaucrats was reasonably uniform.  How well did this work?  Well, the Mongols invaded China and installed their own emperor.  (See Marco Polo's writings for details.)  But after a generation or so things were back to business as usual.  The thousands of Confucian bureaucrats wore down the foreign ideas the Mongols attempted to introduce in the short time of only a generation or so.  In the historical equivalent of a blink of an eye things were back to the Chinese norm.

China also demonstrates what I call the Feudal idea.  The Feudal era in Europe is characterized by kings, right?  Well, yes and no.  The Kings were there but they did not operate in the way we now think of kings operating.  In actuality feudal Europe consisted of a large number of small baronies.  Each consisted of an individual operating out of a castle or other fortification.  He controlled and administered the immediately surrounding lands.  What does "immediately surrounding" mean?  It means the distance you could ride a horse in a day or so.  So something in the range of ten to fifty miles.

The local baron controlled his immediate surroundings.  So where did the king come in?  Feudalism implemented a hierarchical series of  allegiances.  The local baron would swear allegiance to a regional baron.  This chain of allegiance would continue up the hierarchy to the King.  But the effect of swearing allegiance was modest.  Swearing allegiance meant promising to provide a number of troops when called upon and perhaps paying a "tax" in goods or money.  This held rigidly on paper but not so much in actual practice.  At the lowest level the local baron had tremendous power within his local fiefdom.  Everyone else up the hierarchy had a great deal of titular power but very little actual power in most situations.  The exception was in time of war.  And this exception only held if the local barons made good on their pledge of troops.

The hierarchy part was also true in China.  But in China's case the upper echelons also held actual power.  That's why China during this period was an actual country with a government that operated on roughly modern lines while in the rest of the world countries for the most part were a country in name only.  During its existence the Roman Empire followed the Chinese model.  There was a hierarchy.  The upper levels of that hierarchy held actual power so the government again functioned roughly as our modern sensibilities would dictate.  This was also true in a few other places at a few other times.  But instances of actual governance extending beyond the local level were few and far between. 

And the Romans did something else that the Chinese did.  They did what they could to make their transportation system work as well as the technology of the time permitted.  The Romans were famous for building roads.  The Chinese also built roads.  But the Chinese took it a step further by also building canals and improving river borne transportation.  It helped.  But even the Romans and the Chinese fell far short of what we would expect of a modern government.

The closest more recent equivalent of a world government was the British Empire of the late 1800's.  Here we again see the Chinese idea of cultural control being more important that physical control.  The British did not have anything like the Chinese qualifying examination.  But they did have "the playing fields of Eaton".  The upper levels of their educational system were designed to turn out people who could fill colonial bureaucracies in a manner very much along the lines of the Chinese model.  British civil servants were sent out to far flung outposts only after having been imbued with the same consistent world view and ethical standards as their peers.

The British world view and ethical standards were different than the Chinese ones.  But like their Chinese predecessors, they were consistent from person to person.  This allowed the British government to do the kind of delegating that the technology available at the time still required.  Communications and transportation had sped up immensely when compared to that available to the Chinese.  But it was still far from instantaneous and still not up to what would have been required to support a centralized approach.

With the Internet communications around the world is now instantaneous.  So communication is not am impediment standing in the way of the successful formation of a world government.  Nor is transportation.  I defined the size of a feudal barony as being limited by how far a person could ride in a day or two.  It is now possible to get from anywhere on earth to anywhere else in an airplane in less than a day.  Large amounts of material can now be shipped from anywhere to anywhere in less than a month.  So there is no practical impediment to the formation of a world government.  The impediments are entirely political and cultural.

In "Civics 101 (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/12/civics-101.html) I pointed out that the Articles of Confederation, the document that defined how the US Government operated before the Constitution came into force, created a central government.  This government was successful in prosecuting the Revolutionary War but unsuccessful in governing the country afterward.  The reason for this is generally thought to be that the central government was weak.  The Constitution changed this and the government it enabled is generally characterized as being strong.  So what do we mean?

There are two key components that are to be found in strong governments and missing in weak ones.  One is in the area of taxation.  A strong government can on its own levy and collect taxes.  A weak one has to rely on contributions from the "subsidiary" governments.  The Articles laid out a responsibility of the states to contribute revenues for the use of the central government according to stated rules.  But the states often failed to meet their obligations and the central government had no effective method of forcing them to comply.  So the early US government was hamstrung by a lack of revenue.

The other key component of a strong government is preemption.  In certain areas the central government is able to pass (and enforce) laws that preempt the laws of the subsidiary (e.g. state) governments.  To the extent that the Articles conferred preemption power to the central government, it again did not provide a means of enforcement.  So again the states ignored their obligations and the central government was further weakened due to its inability to force compliance.  These weaknesses ultimately doomed the Articles-based government to failure.  And the failure was so obvious that the need for change was quickly identified and the Constitution created and ratified.  And the resulting government has proved to be a success.

With this in mind let's look at some other efforts at a true world government.  The first attempt was the League of Nations.  It was an outcome of the "Great War" (later renamed World War I when a second even greater war came along a generation later).  It was obvious that the European Powers were incapable of avoiding a catastrophe like the Great War on their own.  The Great War was such a great catastrophe that there was a lot of impetus behind the idea of never doing that again.  And the obvious solution was to graft a world government on top of the various national governments.  It's primary job would be to keep all nations in line so no one could start another Great War.

But the result was a weak government.  It lacked the strong government powers of taxation and preemption.  And it quickly and even more dramatically suffered the same fate as the Articles-era US government.  It was completely ineffective and was unable to stop World War II.  By the start of the War in 1939 the League had lost what little credibility and relevance it had started with.

After World War II we went down the same path.  We created a new institution, the United Nations.  But it suffered from the same weaknesses as the League of Nations.  It was a weak central government that lacked the powers of taxation and preemption.  Oh, some "rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic" grade changes were made.  There is now a theoretically powerful Security Council.  But any one of five Great Powers can veto any Security Council measure.  So the weaknesses inherent in the lack of taxation and preemption are compounded by a super-Filibuster power.  The UN is powerful in the fevered imagination of conspiracy theorists with their Black Helicopters but it is almost completely powerless in the real world.

So why do we keep going down the same path?  The argument can be summarized in one word:  sovereignty.  The concept is simple.  "I as a country can do whatever I want and no one else can stop me."  It is an appealing idea and actually worked for the most part until about 1900.  If a country did something and that something happened entirely within its own borders it seemed only common sense that whatever it was it was only the business of that one country.  But what if I am building up a great big army?  And then what if I use that army to invade your country?  The invasion is an obvious and unambiguous breach of sovereignty.  Okay, so what?  The usual response of all other countries was "that's the business of the two countries involved".  This was a practical position.  No one wanted to be the policeman for the world.

In this era sovereignty was more of a propaganda point than anything serious.  "I say old boy - jolly bad show."  And, of course, there was an unwritten rule.  Sovereignty was only something that the big boys (the Europeans) were entitled to.  Ruddy natives in say India were not entitled and gentlemen knew this so the subject was never raised in polite company.

But World Wars I and II were fought between the big boys and the obvious way to avoid World War III was to respect sovereignty.  But the "big buys" rule seems to still come into play all the way down to the present.  US sovereignty is invoked to fend off activities by others against the US but, since Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and other countries are not "big boy" countries they are apparently not entitled to invoke sovereignty when trying to defend against the US invading them.

But sovereignty is a core argument against a strong world government.  It is even frequently invoked against the pathetically weak UN.  A strong world government cannot be permitted because it would be an assault on US sovereignty.  But the implicit assumption in this line of thinking is that US sovereignty is complete or nearly complete now.  But is it?

The US is a big boy so according to the rules it is allowed to assert and defend its sovereignty.  So far so good.  And conspiracy theorists see all kinds of blatant and subtle attacks on US sovereignty and it goes without saying they all need to be resisted.  Hence the need to resist the wicked incursions of the "powerful" UN with its black helicopters everywhere.  But wait -- there's more.  How about all those wicked treaties, like the Geneva Convention that prohibits torture?  See there's this thing about treaties.  There is a Constitutional process for dealing with them.  The President submits them to the US Senate.  If the Senate ratifies a treaty it becomes part of US law.

There is a Constitutional way of revoking or modifying a treaty (see above).  But if you don't do that then it's the law.  And by "law" I mean US law.  The Geneva Convention treaties went through the process and became US law.  Since then the process for modifying or revoking them has not taken place.  They are still the law and they were the law during the period when waterboarding and other types of torture were performed.  In short, the US has voluntarily relinquished sovereignty in certain areas by passing laws or ratifying treaties.  It has done this hundreds of times resulting in the relinquishment of sovereignty in thousands of areas.

But that's not the only way that the US has relinquished sovereignty.  Laws and treaties are methods that involve our duly elected representatives (members of the House of Representatives, Senators, the President) relinquishing it.  Is that all?  Nope.  Remember that business where I said communication and transportation have advanced to the point where world government is now practical.  Well one way our interconnected world is made possible is by regulations, standards, agreements, conventions, etc.  that govern how things are done.  And these regulations, etc. are often formulated, promulgated, etc. by unelected representatives.  In every practical sense these have the effect of law even though no elected body has passed on them.

A classic example is the Internet.  The Internet is based on standards called RFCs for obscure historical reasons.  No arm or component of the US government (or the UN) passed upon or approved these standards.  Instead a bunch of geeks got together and said "let's do things this way".  The Internet is technical.  How about something mundane and a lot older like ships.  There are international rules about how ships are built and operated.  Who sets the rules?  I don't know but I do know there are rules and they are rigidly enforced.  I think some obscure agency of the UN now blesses them but the UN certainly has no direct enforcement ability.

And so it goes.  In the modern world there are all kinds of rules and regulations that have the force of law that govern all kinds of aspects of our lives.  Why can you transfer money anywhere in the world?  How are the rules for airplanes and airports set?  How can Apple design an iPhone in California, manufacture it in China, sell it all over the world, book the profits in a tax haven in some foreign country, and have that iPhone smoothly integrate with hundreds of telephone systems and cell phone networks around the world?

There are thousands of organizations writing the rules of the road around the world.  These rules of the road behave in every important way like laws.  They affect our daily lives in millions of ways.  But what they do is done without any interaction with any US law passing body, be it Federal, State, County, or local.  In each and every case they are a direct attack on what is commonly thought of as US sovereignty.  So why no hew and cry?  Because there is no political advantage to raising the issue.  So no one raises the issue and no one gets all wound up about it.  So these numerous and nameless bodies that are definitely not governments continue to quietly go about their business.  And their business in indistinguishable from the law making that is the job of our legislative bodies.

Taken together these groups constitute a shadow world government.  We live with their actions in exactly the same way that we live with the actions of Congress.  But they are invisible.  In many cases there is little or no oversight.  Taken together they are as powerful or more powerful than any kind of secret government conspiracy theorists dream up.  Taken together they definitely have far more power than the actual UN.  Yet there is no hew and cry in spite of the fact that they are real and the secret governments the conspiracy theorists dream up are not.  So the whole sovereignty based argument against a world government is bunk.

Are there real arguments against a world government?  Sure.  The most fundamental is that it is the kind of thing that is easy to get wrong.  The world has now had a lot of experience with traditional national governments.  And that experience tells us that there are a lot of ways to get it wrong.  And we should now be able to do better.  That very same experience should tell us "do it this way" and "don't do it that way".  But "that way" governments continue to come into existence with depressing regularity.

And it is important to recognize that just because it is possible to so something badly is not a sufficient reason to not do it at all.  Instead we should work carefully to do it right.  That starts with deciding what it is supposed to do.  Unfortunately, that is a large and contentious question.  So I am going to skip past it.  Here is what I am willing to weigh in on.

It should be a strong government.  It should have taxing and preemption powers.  The "Articles" US government, the League of Nations, the UN, and countless other examples lead me to believe that a weak government is a mistake.  The other attribute it should definitely have is that it must be an elective government.  People should vote directly for their representatives and chief executive.  I think our founding fathers got it right when they observed that government legitimacy flows from "the consent of the governed".  It is possible to have a government that is not democratically elected.  It is even possible for that government to operate successfully and persist for long periods of time.  But I think it will ultimately fail because of legitimacy issues.

My goal here is to make the subject of a real (i.e. strong) world government a legitimate subject open for discussion.  If I have achieved that much I am content.  If I have caused you to entertain the possibility that a world government might be a good idea then that's the cherry on the cake.

Death Merchants

Recently I binge watched "The Night Manager".  It is a six episode miniseries broadcast on AMC in April and May of this year.  It is based on the book of the same name by John le Carre.  Mr. le Carre is an astute observer of the intelligence business.  That was his line of business before he became a successful novelist.  So there is always an interesting subtext to his books.  And that subtext is prominently featured in the show.

The show centers around an arms merchant and an arms deal.  For a long time, and rightly so, the nickname of arms dealers was "Death Merchants".  They literally traffic in the machinery that enables the slaughter of enormous numbers of people.  The name has passed out of fashion but the business has stayed the same.  And the business as a business has not actually been around that long.

The first modern arms merchant was the Krupp organization.  For a long time arms were manufactured by governments in armories.  Then an armory was a manufacturing facility.  Now it is simply a place where military arms and equipment is stored.  Or, in a lot of cases, a former armory that has been repurposed for general public use.  So why did governments manufacture arms?  In a word, control.  Governments knew arms were extremely dangerous.  They wanted to maintain complete control.  The best way to do this was to keep all phases of the manufacture, distribution, and use of arms in house.

The Krupp family was one of the first civilian operations to challenge this.  The Krupps started out in the steel business.  In the late 1800's the steel business was evolving rapidly.  Most notably, the Bessemer process was introduced at this time.  This process made it possible to produce a number of different kinds of high quality steel cheaply and in quantity.  And one of the major uses of steel was in arms.  This was particularly true of artillery weapons.

Better steel made for better and cheaper artillery guns.  So the Krupps were able to introduce "new and improved" artillery guns.  And Germany was just coalescing as a country.  So selling solely to the German government restricted sales opportunities.  And the government was weak initially so they were in no position to block foreign sales.  This permitted the Krupps to sell all over Europe.  They made a lot of money doing this.

So what's the defense to a good artillery gun?  Armor.  And what's armor made of?  Steel.  So the Krupps were able to sell artillery pieces.  Then they were able to sell armor to the enemies of their customers.  This in turn created a market for a better and more powerful artillery gun.  Bingo!  Another round of sales as continued improvements in steel made it possible to create better guns.  And this in turn necessitated more and better armor.

The Krupp family invented the concept of an arms race and profited greatly from the invention.  And soon other companies got into the game.  And that's how we came to have the gigantic "defense" industry of today.  And this industry is still adept at playing the arms race game to justify yet another round of very expensive and very profitable "new and improved" military weapons.  The only real change is that the industry has diversified into all kinds of military gear and no longer restricts itself to just artillery pieces and armor.

So there are a lot of defense contractors out there that are hungry for the next sale.  And that's where arms merchants come in.  And the arms business has featured prominently in popular culture for generations.  The "Little Orphan Annie" newspaper comic strip, launched in 1924, featured a character named Daddy Warbucks.  Why "Warbucks"?  Because he was an arms merchant.  The Broadway show and subsequent movie "Annie" minimize this aspect of the character.  But that was not true in the first couple of decades of the comic strip's run.

In 2005 the Nicholas Cage movie "Lord of War" was an arms merchant/arms deal movie that had a lot of similarities to "The Night Manager".  And a more serious student of the cinema than I am can easily find many more examples of the movies and TV shows exploring the arms business.  And for the most part they follow a formula.  You have the good guys trying to shut down the bad guy arms merchant.  Reduced to its essence that is true of "Lord of War", "The Night Manager", and other examples of the genre.  At some level most people think trafficking in arms is a nasty business.  So the trafficker is the bad guy and the people trying to stop him are the good guys.

What is different about "The Night Manager" is that this show makes explicit the complicity of the government.  Le Carre is British and writes about Brits.  So in this case it is the British government that is looking the other way.  It was the British government misbehaving in "The Night Manager".  But other stories featuring other nationalities should also change the government because everybody does it.  Kudos to Mr. le Carre for having the honesty to shed light on this.   But it is also important to note that "The Night Manager" does pull its punches to some extent.  The government complicity is portrayed not as official policy but rather as the activities of "rogue elements".  Let me translate that.  The more appropriate operative phrase is "plausible deniability".

And that's where pretty much everyone gets this wrong.  The arms merchants are portrayed as operating outside the system.  They are independent agents.  But how real is this independence?  In the real world "independent" arms merchants exist to serve a purpose and that purpose is plausible deniability.  We are told these stories about independent rogue arms merchants because it makes us feel better.  And to some extent they exist.  But this is because there are numerous governments that need a mechanism through which to funnel arms to this group or that.  Often these groups are unsavory or an official connection is inconvenient.  But if the arms are funneled through an "independent arms merchant" then the problem is solved.

This is illustrated in the "Charlie Wilson's War" events.  I discussed this book and movie in a post I made back in 2011.  Here's the link:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/06/pakistan.html.  Mr. Wilson's War was the one the US prosecuted by proxy in Afghanistan in the early '80s.  The Russians (then the U.S.S.R.) had invaded Afghanistan.  We saw an opportunity to embarrass them by supporting a domestic opposition.  But for political reasons we need to keep our fingerprints off this support.  So what we did was to get Saudi Arabia to fund things.  We then got Israel and Egypt to front for the whole operation.

Egypt was particularly important because they are an Arabic country and not a hated western country like the US or Israel.  They were also important because they had huge stockpiles of Soviet weapons.  So when these weapons showed up on the battlefield we could say "They are not our guns -- go talk to someone else".  Everybody knew what was really going on.  Oh, the details of the Saudi - Israeli - Egyptian front operation only emerged much later.  But everyone knew the U.S. was behind the whole thing.  But we could "plausibly deny" it and others could "plausibly believe" us.  This smoke screen made it much easier on countries and people who generally supported tossing the Russians out of Afghanistan but for one reason or another needed to be able to put some public distance between themselves and the US.

The Charlie Wilson's War situation is a nice example where everything has since come out and we can now study the details of how it all worked.  But this situation where governments need a cut-out is actually common.  And it is common enough to keep an ever changing cast of "independent arms merchants" in business.  None of them are able to get into business or stay in business without the tacit support of one or more governments.  The trick for these people is to reliably service the needs of their sponsors while staying out of the direct line of fire of their detractors.

And it is another polite fiction that these people are a significant part of the problem.  They are all small beer.  The deal in "The Night Porter" was supposedly valued at $600 million.  That sounds like a lot of money.  But it's not.  The Stockholm Peace Research Institute is considered the best independent source for information on international arms sales.  In 2015 alone, the US exported over $10 billion dollars worth (in 1990 dollars) of arms.  The deal in the show was a $0.6 billion dollar deal.  It was a rounding error in the figure for US sales for one year.  The same study showed roughly two dollars of sales by the rest of the world for every dollar of US sales.  The size of the sale in the show is similar to say the sale of perhaps a dozen second tier fighter jets.  A routine sale like that wouldn't even make the news.

This whole focus on "independent arms dealers" allows us all to pretend that they are the problem rather than us through our governments.  And consider this.  A new assault weapon (AK-47, M-16, M-4) costs in round numbers $500.  How many Afghan subsistence farmers or Iraqi small business owners or Syrian sheep herders or other poor people swept up in war have a spare $500 laying around?  The answer is that very few of them do.  Yet these war zones are awash in assault weapons.  What's going on?  Well, some tax payer somewhere is funneling large amounts of money through some back channel or another to pay to get these kinds of guns into the hands of desperately poor people.

Trust me.  The company that makes the gun is paid full list price for the gun.  And over time there is another result.  Somewhere, Egypt in the case of Charlie Wilson's War, there are warehouses full of guns left over from this or that conflict or from one politically inspired arms deal or another.  The Soviets sold Egypt lots of arms back in the day to gain influence.  Now we sell arms to Egypt for exactly the same reason.

These stockpiles of no longer needed guns, bombs, etc. are then available to support large eruptions of violence at a different time or in a different place.  The "dead ender" forces that opposed us after 2003 in Iraq were amply armed.  How?  Well, over the years we had sold vast quantities or arms to Saddam.  These were stored in vast warehouses, armories, and ammo dumps that were left unsecured when we declared "Mission Accomplished".  The bad guys just hauled away these stolen weapons in stolen trucks and later pointed them at our troops.  And guess what?  ISIS did the same thing again a couple of years ago when the current Iraqi government bungled things in Ambar Province.

Guns don't evaporate over time.  If no one makes a concerted effort to get rid of them they just sit around until someone gets their hands on them and starts making use of them.  There has been a concerted effort to get rid of poison gas.  This effort has been surprisingly effective.  There has also been a concerted effort to get rid of land mines.  This has also been surprisingly effective.  Finally, there has been a concerted effort to get rid of nuclear weapons.  That goal looks impossible to achieve and I'm not sure it is a good idea.  But there has been substantial and successful efforts to reduce nuclear stockpiles, reduce "loose" nuclear material, and secure the remaining nuclear weapons.

But, while this is all to the good, these three categories represent a tiny fraction of the types of dangerous weapons out there.  And there is no progress on any of them.   An old saw councils us that "when you are in a hole the first step is to stop digging".  Yet, spectacular though the figures on arms shipments are, they represent only a small portion of new weapon production.  If we can't stop digging we should at least dig more slowly.