Don’t talk to people employed by defence contractors about the peace dividend – all it means to them is grave jeopardy for their jobs: GEC Plc is cutting 600 jobs with the closure of Marconi Radar & Control Systems Ltd factory in Chelmsford, and another 225 jobs are going at the GEC-Marconi Communications factory in the same Essex town; across the channel, another 650 are to go at Dassault Electronique SA of Paris over the next 18 months (these things take time in France); Dassault says that the $37m cost of the cuts will put it back into the red this year; the company currently does only 26% of its $725m a year business outside the defence field – it has interests in computer-aided design software, telecommunications and automation, but it is forecasting that the proportion will rise to 50% by 1994 or 1995.
