As your columnist, Ken Owen, noted back in 1995, apartheid might have lasted another 50 years except that militarists Armscor in particular bankrupted SA.

Undeterred, your correspondent, Helmoed Romer Heitman, continues to tout the economic benefits of the defence industry (April 22). It is internationally well accepted that the armaments industry is capital-intensive and a poor creator of jobs. It is heavily subsidised, even in the US.

Such subsidies divert public resources away from priorities such as education, housing and health services.

It is an industry particularly notorious for corruption.

The arms deal report confirmed that the late former defence minister Joe Modise overruled even the SA Air Force High Command by insisting upon "a visionary approach" to sustain SA's apartheid-era armaments industry. We have subsequently learned that Modise was a very substantial beneficiary of these arrangements.

Heitman gushes that the benefits of the arms deal include a R62m contract to produce periscopes and a R225m contract to produce brass ammunition components. Such contracts amount to small change, compared with the more than R52,7bn expense to SA tax payers for warships we do not need and war planes that even the Air Force does not want.

Government was gullible and naive in swallowing the irrational nonsense that expenditure of R30bn on armaments would create offsets of R110bn to create 65165 jobs. Coega was to have been the flagship project of the offset programme in return for three submarines. But the $1bn stainless steel plant has been downscaled to an automated condom factory.

About 35% of SA's population is unemployed, and about 50% classified as "poor". As former US president Dwight Eisenhower remarked half a century ago, every cent spent on armaments is a theft from the poor. There are no "benefits" from an industry dedicated to the promotion of war, and the creation not of wealth but of human misery.

With acknowledgements to Terry Crawford-Browne and Business Day.