No arms embargo

The Vulture

Banned
As we all know, the United Nations Security Council's Resolution 418 created a mandatory arms embargo on apartheid South Africa. This caused South Africa to create a large homegrown weapons industry.

Now, what if the Security Council had not imposed this embargo, allowing South Africa to obtain modern fighters and naval craft from France and Israel? Might it possibly extend apartheid by giving the Afrikaners courage to do an armed crackdown on Mandela?
 
If the Afrikaners had bought high tech weapons they would of run out of money quicker than they actually did, there was nothing in the coffers when the Afrikaner government eventually did fall. High tech weapons would not have had much practical use in a civil war except to rouse the soft left in the West even more.

In other words ithe embargo may well have delayed the fall of apartheid
 

MacCaulay

Banned
If the Afrikaners had bought high tech weapons they would of run out of money quicker than they actually did, there was nothing in the coffers when the Afrikaner government eventually did fall. High tech weapons would not have had much practical use in a civil war except to rouse the soft left in the West even more.

In other words ithe embargo may well have delayed the fall of apartheid

I'm going to have to disagree with you.

You're basically making the argument that it's cheaper to buy a modern military than it is to build one. The South Africans built ARMSCOR from the ground up, refitted their Mirage III fleet into Cheetahs, have modernized their Centurion MBTs for over 50 years now, and have designed, built, exported and repaired different kinds of armoured cars and fighting vehicles.

The Air Force has designed, tested, built, and used different generations of air-to-air missiles and their concurrent systems (including a headset that was wired to the Kukri IR-missile)

The South African Navy has designed and built it's own at-sea replenishment ship, the largest ship ever built and put to see in Africa.

Then they took all these systems and fought a decade long Border War against the Angolans and Cubans where they were engaged in guerilla and conventional combat.

There's no way they could've spent more money buying things from other countries than they did building all that. I just don't see it.
 
You can't lie about the cost of weapons when you have to build them yourself. There are no offsets, credits, barter deals and all that other shit which occurs when countries import their weapons. When you build them yourself you get what you pay for. The kicker is that when a small country builds it's own weapons it usually gets the sort of effectivness and value for money that the great powers only dream of.
 
To clarify what I said earlier

The two main reasons for the end of Afrikaner National Party rule were

1) The deeply religious National party could not maintain the intellectual rigour to defend a morally repugnant system against the tyranny of numbers with no allies

2) They ran out of money


Having a complete advantage of high tech military equipment made absolutely no difference to the final outcome.

At least pumping billions of dollars into your own country even in the weapons industry generates economic activity which the government can get some return in their treasury to maintain the system.

There would have been nothing gained at all (except debt) by spending the same amount of money on weapons oversees

The arms embargo delayed point 2


 

MacCaulay

Banned
To clarify what I said earlier

The two main reasons for the end of Afrikaner National Party rule were

1) The deeply religious National party could not maintain the intellectual rigour to defend a morally repugnant system against the tyranny of numbers with no allies

2) They ran out of money


Having a complete advantage of high tech military equipment made absolutely no difference to the final outcome.

At least pumping billions of dollars into your own country even in the weapons industry generates economic activity which the government can get some return in their treasury to maintain the system.

There would have been nothing gained at all (except debt) by spending the same amount of money on weapons oversees

The arms embargo delayed point 2


I believe you have some good points. Despite everything it stood for, the South African apartheid regime still ran what was probably the best economy in all of Africa for about the same reason Israel does in the Middle East: if it didn't, then there would've been no more country.

But the South African economy is built on a immensely large bedrock of gold mining. When they did buy weapons from overseas (the Centurions in '52, the Mirages and SS.11 ATGMs from France), they were able to pay with actual money right on the spot.
That's why most governments were willing to do business with the South Africans even though they disliked the regime, much like why countries still buy Middle Eastern oil.

Heck, in the 80s, when the economy was down, the South Africans were even contracting out work to American machine shops. My dad made blasting cap holders for a South African mining company that couldn't find the machining space in South Africa. That shows you just how insulated they were from the economics of the rest of the world, and what the embargo was doing: it was the early 80s, we were in a recession, and the South Africans were contracting out machining jobs they were too busy to do.

So I believe I'm still going to have to disagree with you. In my mind it still comes down to whether it's cheaper to buy a military or build one, and it's always cheaper to buy one. I think we might just have to agree to disagree on this.
 
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