Seymour Melman, 86, Dies;

Spurred Antiwar Movement

Jennifer Bayot, New York Times

Seymour Melman, a Columbia University scholar who helped galvanize the antiwar movement from the 1950's on with analyses of the social costs of military spending, died on Dec. 16 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.The cause appeared to be an aneurysm, said Benjamin Abrams, his research assistant.

Dr. Melman, an economist who taught industrial engineering at Columbia, was a leading advocate of disarmament for nearly half a century. He opposed nuclear weapons almost from their inception and he opposed the current war in Iraq.

A longtime co-chairman of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, he emphasized arguments that military spending diverted resources from health care, public housing and education.

In speeches, editorials, scholarly articles and close to a dozen books, he criticized the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and maintained that the United States and the Soviet Union were draining their economies for little more than the ability to destroy each other hundreds of times over. He popularized the use of the word "overkill" to describe the buildup. "Isn't 1,250 times overkill enough?" he wrote in a 1964 letter to the New York Times. "Since the Soviets by similar calculation can overkill the United States only 145 times, are we to believe that any advantage exists here for either side?"

He rebutted a post-World War II argument that war drove the economy, maintaining that the opposite was true and that other factors helped pull the country out of the Depression.

In his 1974 book, The Permanent War Economy, he composed a long list of military trade-offs. The money spent on one Huey helicopter, he said, could buy 66 low-priced homes, while a recent $69 million reduction in child-nutrition programs represented the cost of two DE-1052 destroyer escorts. He added, "To eliminate hunger in America = $4-5 billion = C-5A aircraft program."

"His work changed the debate in the peace movement to much broader issues," said Marcus Raskin, a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal research institute, and an adviser to the National Security Council in the Kennedy administration.

Professor Melman's arguments appealed to a wide spectrum, attracting unions like the United Automobile Workers and the Machinists Union as well as public advocates like Ralph Nader, who yesterday described Prof. Melman's studies as "prescient for decades."

Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and antiwar activist, said Dr. Melman helped mobilize what once was weak and scattered resistance to war and other military operations.

"The country is a lot different than it was 30 to 40 years ago, and he had a big role in that," Mr. Chomsky said. "There's much more widespread opposition to the diversion of resources to military production, to the use of force in international affairs, to nuclear development."

Dr. Melman became an authority on a process called "economic conversion," the retooling of arms factories and military bases for civilian purposes. He outlined such plans in The Demilitarized Society (1988) and Rebuilding America(1992). He advised the United Nations on the possibilities of economic conversion from 1979 to 1980, and from 1988 on, he was chairman of The National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament.

Seymour Melman was born in the Bronx on Dec. 30, 1917. He received a bachelor's degree in economics from College of the City of New York in 1939.

After serving in the United States Army during World War II, he received a doctorate in economics from Columbia, where he was later chairman of the industrial engineering department.

His books on military spending include Our Depleted Society (1965), Pentagon Capitalism (1970) and Profits Without Production (1983).

His more recent books, including After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Economy (2001), describe the potential of employee self-management, an idea that interested him for decades. As a young man, he briefly lived on a kibbutz in Israel, and later in his career participated in studies and meetings on the productivity of such collective settlements.

Dr. Melman is survived by a brother, Myron, of Rehovot, Israel. His marriage to JoAnne Medalie ended in divorce.