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the armoury of NATO was facilitated as much by the existence of a com­
prehensive industrial and technological infrastructure in the countries of
Western Europe as it was by their lengthy military experience. Both prerequis­
ites were lacking in the case of Persia. In consequence, the shah burdened his
country with a massive programme of arms procurement without having taken
the trouble to determine whether the Persian economy had the capacity to
underwrite it, whether the skilled manpower was available to implement it or
whether the arms in question were suited to Persia’s real defensive needs.
The cost of the arms programme to the Persian economy did not end with the
acquisition of the weapons. Resources and manpower which would have been
better employed in improving Persia’s industrial and agricultural performance
were diverted into the martial extravaganza. Between 1974 and 1977 a total
sum of $3,200 million over and above the actual defence appropriations was

spent on the construction of military bases, housing and other facilities con­
nected with the defence programme. The salaries, allowances and upkeep of
American technicians and advisers with the armed forces consumed a dispro­
portionately large slice of the defence budget - some $100,000 per annum for
every man, and there were 20,000 such technicians and advisers in Persia. In
fact, it was reckoned that more than half the cost of each defence contract was
absorbed by the expenses of the training, maintenance and advisory personnel
associated with it. For this, however, the shah could not be held wholly or even
largely responsible. On the contrary, he was being brazenly exploited by
American and British defence contractors, spurred on by their own
governments.
When President Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, visited
Tehran in May 1972, on their way back from disarmament talks in Moscow,

they told the shah that the United States would be willing to sell him the
advanced F-14 aircraft (which had had its first proving flight barely eighteen
months previously) so as to counter both the Russian MiG-23 and MiG-25
which, the shah alleged, had been making surveillance flights over northern
Persia. Two months later Nixon instructed the Departments of State and
Defence to comply with virtually any request from the shah for the supply of
conventional weapons. It was an unprecedented act of policy by the United
States with respect to arms sales to any non-Western country. Moreover, it ran
directly counter to the advice given by Nixon’s own secretary of defence, James
Schlesinger, that the provision of advanced weapons to countries like Persia
carried with it a security risk, as well as a danger of political entanglement,
since the acquisition of such weapons would require the services of American
technicians and advisers for training and maintenance purposes for a long time
to come. Why Nixon chose to ignore this warning and effectively to exempt the
shah s arms orders from the scrutiny normally accorded requests for arms from

non-Western countries by the Departments of State and Defence is not entirely
clear. The only immediately obvious explanation is that he and his secretary of