The Politics of the British Arms Sales Since 1964

by Mark Phythian

Since World War II Britain has consistently been one of the world's leading arms exporters. At the same time, arms sales have been at the top of the political agenda in such cases as the arms-to-Iraq, the Pergau Dam affairs, and concerns over the sale of arms to countries such as Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Drawing extensively on official documents, this book is the first in-depth analysis of British arms sales policy.

352 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2000

Reviews

[Jonah Lo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The definitive text on the subject. As a text produced in the 1990s with archival access correspondingly limited to the 1960s, Phythian's study naturally faces a great many limitations, and occasionally still produces a fact or two that the archivally-informed might today be able to flag as inaccurate.

Despite this, Phythian still accomplished incredible work with public sources and NGO-collated data, tracing a 85% accurate and best-available history of the British Arms Government-Industry Complex with regards to sales in South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

In doing so, he provides several important insights: the special role of Thatcher, who conceived of arms sales as not just an area for policy and profit gains, but an ideological objective to revive the image of British power; the Labour-Tory dynamic, in which the latter would advance sales eagerly and the former would grudgingly honour under pressure from the civil service; how the US-UK relationship on specific country portfolios could be fraught with both sales competition and cooperation over avoiding being played against each other (as was the case for Saudi Arabia); and how Britain would knowingly solicit meaningless end-use assurances as cover for sales (El Salvador and Indonesia).