TWO WEEKS AGO, Boston voters approved a referendum that appeared to be of little significance. The question read:

Shall the City Council call upon the U.S. Congress to make more federal funds available for local jobs and programs--in quality education, public transportation, energy-efficient housing, improved health-care, and other essential services--by reducing the amount of our tax dollars spent on nuclear weapons and programs of foreign military intervention? Since the victory of the referendum is non-binding, the Boston City Council can choose not to make any such suggestion to Congress. Likewise, even if the Council does send a formal letter to Washington, Congress may well dismiss or ignore the request. Election night coverage on television made no mention of the referendum; neither did the late stocks edition of The Boston Globe the following day. But despite the obscurity of the referendum, the question intimately affects the lives of everyone in Boston.

Unchecked, military spending could destroy Boston. A staggering 57 per cent of all federal tax dollars go to military-related spending, most of it in the Department of Defense. This means that in 1982, Boston residents will pay $815 million in taxes for military spending. At the same time, only $441 million in property taxes will go to the city for essential services. The resulting arithmetic is brutally simple.

Massachusetts ranks sixth among states receiving defense contracts. Raytheon and General Electric, the two largest private employers in Massachusetts, build missiles, nuclear arms, sophisticated equipment, and a host of other war-related products. This economic dependency on military sends local prices soaring: As President Carter's inflation fighter, Alfred Kahn, noted. "It (military spending) puts money into the hands of workers without expanding the supply of goods they can buy. There is no consumer market for missiles, thereby driving up the prices of goods like autos and refrigerators and machine tools." In terms of individual spending power, Massachusetts ranks as the thirty-seventh poorest state in the country. Food costing $2.999.00 for a family in Austin, Texas, costs a Boston family $3.733.00. The numbers may not convey the human costs of the economic realities

Sarah Small, a chaplain at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, runs Packard-Manse House in Roxbury. The old green house, once elegant, could use a paint job and a good cleaning. Small's haven for the homeless now gives food to anyone who needs it. Every week, several churches send food to "Aunt Sarah," which gets sorted into shopping bags. Poor people drop by when they can, to take a bag or two. The list of takers grows every week.

Across the street from Packard-Manse stands what used to be Roxbury High School. It was closed in June, so it hasn't been vandalized. Yet. Most students who used to go there take a bus every morning to a chilly reception at Charlestown High. The dropout rate for Roxbury youth was high when a local school was convenient; it will almost surely go up now. With luck, the dropouts may find unskilled work. Rallies, meetings and court-proceedings against the government did not change the budgetary facts. A number of schools were closed, and nearly one out of every five Boston teachers were laid off.

A year's pay for those 1240 teachers would cost $16.3 million. That amounts to two per cent of the $815 million in taxes Bostonians will give to the military in 1982. Four days of planning for the MX missile program costs $16 million. The situation in Boston seems grotesquely similar to President Eisenhower's observation in 1953: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who cold and are not clothed."

Dozens of politicians, civic groups and religious leaders endorse a concrete alternative offered by the Employment Research Associates. The idea involves a trial $10 billion shift from military to civilian industries. Specifically, the money would go to develop solar and wind energy, gasahol production, the modernization of the nation's railroads, and several other alternative industries that serve a national purpose. Converting the economy from war to peace industries brings an added benefit: more jobs. Military spending employs fewer people than almost any other sector of the economy. One billion dollars spent by the Pentagon creates 75,710 jobs; the same billion employs 92,071 people if spent on mass transit, 138,939 people if spent on health care, and 187,299 people if spent on education.

National security and military vigilance have an unquestionably vital importance, especially today. Taxpayers should know, however, the real cost of a $1.5 trillion defense buildup. A tradeoff exists: while fares on the MBTA have tripled in the last year, the entire MBTA budget ($60 million) equals less than the cost of three F/A-18 fighter planes (1366 are planned). In the end, political support for economic conversion does not amount to a choice of butter over guns. The question is of civilians demanding the right to participate in the decision of how many guns will replace their butter. In struggling for that right, we need something politically more serious than a non-binding suggestion to local government. But the referendum--neglected though it was--served as a poignant remainder of our skewed national priorities and their implications for the future of our region.