War and its Cost from a Human Perspective

Five Star General, Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, pointedly illustrated the ruinous consequences
of money funneled into the military rather than directed to society as a whole:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this:

• a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
• It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
• It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
• It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” (16 April 1953)