the weapons trade, for what it's worth

Today ends the IDEX 07 armament show in Abu Dhabi. The Associated Press reports an estimated 900 weapons manufacturers and security firms came anticipating over two billion dollars in contracts; with helicopters and electronic warning sensors expected to do particularly well.

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 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. 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.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953