Arsenal of democracy?

George Orwell wrote an essay for the Tribune newspaper in 1945 (it wasn't a magazine back then), entitled You and the Atom Bomb. He argued that the development of The Bomb was likely to make the world more authoritarian and oppressive, on the grounds that weapons which are difficult and expensive to manufacture are tyrannical weapons, concentrating power in a few hands.

Weapons like the musket, longbow, rifle and hand grenade, which are cheap and simple to manufacture are, he wrote, "inherently democratic weapons".

A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak.

I've been pondering this phrase and wondering whether or not it's an enormous over-simplification. It must have seemed true to a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, with direct experience of progressive idealists fighting Fascists with antique rifles and improvised Mills bombs, at a time when the Fascists were supported by the Condor Legion's bombers, whilst the most modern and expensive kit to be fielded in support of the Republic came from Stalin's Soviet Union.

But did this rule always hold true and is it true today? The September 11th hijackers' ultimate goal, as far as can I can see, was to pave the way a decidedly anti-democratic and authoritarian Caliphate, ruled by clerics. Their arsenal couldn't have been simpler - craft knives and the willingness to die. The chosen weapon of the Taliban - as undemocratic as they come - is the relatively simple improvised roadside bomb, or increasingly, the suicide bomb. The Rwandan genocides were carried out with machetes. Yet almost all liberal democracies have manufactured or acquired an collection of expensive, high-tech weaponry, such as missiles, tanks, jet warplanes and warships.

Wastefully stockpiling killing machines worth millions seems profoundly wrong, yet looking around at the world, it seems that it's not just the tyrants and bad guys who do it - if you live in a country with a comparatively decent system of government, the odds are that it is piling up expensive, complex weapons, whilst those who'd like to see the end of democracy are patiently making simple weapons in a shed somewhere. Those simple weapons are often like the ones which Orwell described - one's to which there is no answer (in this case because the users are prepared to die when delivering them).

Have things changed profoundly since Orwell wrote his essay, or did his rule about complex and simple weapons never really apply in all cases? I don't know the answer and haven't had much time to think about the question, but it's an interesting one.