The Global Arms Bazaar at Century’s End

Lora Lumpe is a senior analyst at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), where she directs a research programme on small arms production and trade in support of the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers [www.nisat.org], a collaborative effort by the Norwegian government and four Norwegian private organisations to raise awareness of the issue and reduce the flow of light weaponry.

 

 

The legal, or state-sanctioned, trade in conventional weaponry—the stuff of everyday wars, from supersonic bombers and laser-guided missiles to machine guns and grenades—has declined dramatically since the late 1980s. The US State Department estimates that, in real terms (inflation-adjusted dollars), the worldwide commerce was halved during the period 1987–1996, from $84 billion to $42 billion.¹ This steep drop was almost wholly attributable to the end of subsidised transfers from Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and to sharp cuts in procurement by East European governments after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Militaries in the West, in Europe in particular, also reduced their weapons purchases in response to the diminished threat.

 

In addition, during the 1990s the United Nations, the European Union, the Organisation of American States, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the oddly-named “Wassenaar Arrangement”² all established consultative and transparency measures related to arms transfers. As a result, while public information is still far from complete, more governments now report openly on the volume of weapons shipments they are authorising, and many disclose specific items being imported and exported. Such transparency is imperative for a healthy democracy, and is a prerequisite for challenging the most dangerous corporate and governmental arms exports.

 

Despite these positive trends, however, in many cases the trade continues to arm repressive governments, to undermine democratic and economic development, and to encourage and enable the waging of war around the world. Progress in reversing these realities has not kept pace with the promise afforded by the end of East-West hostilities. This lack of progress is due to a failure of imagination, a lack of courage and the power of vested interests, particularly among the very states that are entrusted by the UN with safeguarding global security.

 

The five permanent members of the Security Council—Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States—overwhelmingly dominate this global commerce, accounting still (as during the Cold War) for approximately 80 per cent of weapons supplies. The end of the Cold War left these and other states with large stocks of surplus weapons, as they downsized their militaries. It also left them with massive arms industries that needed to produce ever more weapons in order to stay alive. These countries did not choose to pursue co-operative, effective strategies for converting their military industries to some new and, preferably, socially necessary production. Nor did they, for the most part, choose to destroy surplus weapons stocks.

 

Further adding to the global weapons glut, the end of the Cold War also opened many borders and saw the breakdown, in countries in the East in particular, of structures responsible for controlling arms production and transfers. These phenomena gave rise to an increase (or a presumed increase) in the illicit—unauthorised—arms trade. Overlay all this with the decade’s hyper-aggressive free-trade/free-market philosophy, and the result has been fierce competition among arms suppliers for a diminished market. In particular, intensive effort has gone into creating new customers in the developing world, where three-quarters of all arms purchases are made. To make a multi-billion-dollar sale today, suppliers are willing to overlook the character of the recipient government and the ambient economic and politico-military situation into which they are introducing arms. They are also willing to sell the most modern, lethal weapons they produce. And, to top it off, they will provide economic assistance and/or technology transfers to sweeten the deal.

 

This article describes the market trends in more detail, assesses their possible implications for global and human security, and lays out some prospects for controlling the deadly weapons trade. 

Market Trends 

The administration of Bill Clinton has pushed arms to an unprecedented degree, excluding only a handful of countries and just two categories of weapons from its sales (see below). In the early 1990s, the US administration sought to build consensus on cutting off the flow of conventional weaponry and military-related technologies to states it considered to be “rogues”—Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea—acting outside norms of civilised behaviour. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the world has been considered fair game, with a frequent justification for many arms sales being the need to deter these “rogue” governments.

 

Boosted by the powerful advert that was the 1991 Gulf War, generous military aid programmes, America’s global military pre-eminence and the occasional persuasive phone call from the White House, American weaponry has dominated the world market throughout the decade. In 1997, according to one US government estimate, the United States shipped over $16 billion of newly manufactured arms abroad, nearly as much as all other countries of the world combined (see Table 1).

 

Besides the bottom-line interests of corporations, there is a mix of security and diplomatic rationales that underlies US arms trading. In its February 1995 policy on conventional arms, the Clinton administration declared the legitimacy of using arms transfers to gain access to overseas military facilities, maintain the arms industrial base, promote “interoperability” of US and foreign military forces, and help friends and allies deter aggression.³ The need for “interoperability” of weaponry has become Washington’s chief rationale for widespread arms exports. Interoperability—commonality of arms—is considered to be important for coalition warfare, which the United States built up during the Cold War in order to contain the spread of communism. Post–Cold War US security doctrine now requires that American forces be prepared to fight or intervene anywhere in the world, quickly. Arms transfers and joint military training exercises are used to gain access to overseas bases and to establish the infrastructure necessary for US intervention.

 

America’s principal competition has come from the arms industries of western Europe—in particular, those of Britain, France and Germany—for sales to the developing world, as well as to their own militaries. In the 1990s, the value of combined exports from European suppliers in a given year is roughly equivalent to the value of US exports.

 

In the United States, the export drive is not fundamental to the continued existence of the military industry, which is now dominated by several giant corporations formed through a dramatic series of mergers and acquisitions in the mid-1990s. From the US corporate perspective, exports are principally a profit-rich endeavour, the icing on the cake. Maintenance of a particular surplus production line might rely on exports, but not the fate of a corporation. Development and production of multi-hundred-billion-dollar “next generation” weapons systems are the real bread and butter of these corporations.

 

For the European suppliers, on the other hand, exports are essential in order to create economies of scale that will lower prices sufficiently to allow for the maintenance of autonomous or semi-autonomous industries. European industrial integration has lagged behind the pace of consolidation in the United States, but it is expected to rise and should theoretically reduce some of the surplus capacity and allow greater production efficiency. (It should be noted, however, that the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta in 1995, and that of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas in 1997, produced little reduction in surplus capacity. For example, instead of converting existent surplus fighter-aircraft production lines to the development of new production, entirely new production continues to be established.)

 

In 1995 Russia re-emerged as a major player in the arms bazaar, reportedly edging out the United States in terms of the value of new sales contracts signed.⁴ Russia’s principal niche has emerged as a supplier to states that are legally able to purchase arms (that is, they are not subject to a UN Security Council arms embargo), but that are unable or unwilling to buy arms from the United States. Iran was Russia’s leading customer in the early part of the decade, until the United States isolated Iran and effectively delegitimised exports to that country—despite the fact that Iran is not under UN embargo. Subsequently, China and India have become Russia’s two largest customers.

 

 

TABLE 1

Worldwide Arms Shipments, by Supplier, 1990–1997

(in Millions of Current-Year US Dollars)

 

	1990	1991	1992	1993	1994	1995	1996	1997	Total
United States	9,696	9,784	9,597	12,103	9,843	11,496	9,301	16,379	88,199
USSR/Russia	15,000	6,200	2,500	3,200	1,500	3,700	3,100	2,400	37,600
France	5,300	2,400	1,800	1,200	1,400	2,200	3,200	4,900	22,400
UK	4,600	4,900	4,700	4,600	5,200	5,100	6,100	5,900	41,100
China	2,000	1,400	1,000	1,100	700	600	600	1,000	8,400
Germany	1,600	2,400	1,200	1,700	1,600	1,700	1,000	300	11,500
Italy	200	300	500	400	200	200	100	300	2,200
Rest of Europe	3,000	2,000	3,400	2,100	2,500	2,700	2,800	2,400	20,900
All others	2,200	2,000	1,900	2,100	2,800	2,600	2,300	2,200	18,100
Total	43,596	31,384	26,597	28,503	25,743	30,296	28,501	35,779	250,399

 

Source: Data from Richard F. Grimmett, “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1990–1997”, CRS Report for Congress (Washington, D.C.: CRS, Library of Congress, 31 July 2024), pp. 13, 79. The figures for the United States combine industry-negotiated sales (p. 13) with government brokered sales (p. 79). 

 

Note: All data are estimates of weapons deliveries, based on US government information and assessments.

 

 

One impact of NATO’S 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia has been to highlight again the prowess of American military aircraft and munitions. It might therefore serve as a marketing boon and result in increased sales of American arms. But the war is likely to have antithetical market effects as well, such as strengthening Russian resolve to counter US military dominance through increased weapons production and arms exports. In July, Russia’s then Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin called for renewed investment in weapons design and production, although without elaborating where the necessary funds would come from. China, Russia’s former ideological adversary, has been Moscow’s best client in the 1990s, purchasing four Kilo-class submarines, at least seventy-two Su-27 fighter aircraft and a permit to produce as many as two hundred of the aircraft locally.⁵ NATO’s Yugoslav intervention will probably also spur leaders in Beijing to step up this modernisation drive as a deterrent against any future such intervention in China’s affairs.

 

On the importing side, Saudi Arabia has dominated the market throughout the 1990s almost as heavily as the United States has dominated the supply side. Not surprisingly, the United States is Saudi Arabia’s main supplier, although many European companies have also benefited from Saudi largesse. According to US government estimates, from 1986 to 1996 the Riyadh government took delivery of $97.6 billion of the world’s most modern armaments. To put this figure in perspective, consider that Saudi Arabia’s primary regional rival—revolutionary Iran—imported less than $15 billion of weaponry during the same period.⁶ See Table 2 for a listing of other leading arms importers in recent years.

 

 

TABLE 2

Leading Arms Importers, 1994–96

 

1	Saudi Arabia	$26.6 billion
2	Japan	$6 billion
3	Egypt	$5.7 billion
4	Turkey	$5 billion
5	South Korea	$4.8 billion
6	Taiwan	$4.1 billion
7	United Kingdom	$3.6 billion
8	Australia	$3.5 billion
9	Kuwait	$3.4 billion
10	United States	$3.3 billion
11	Israel	$2.9 billion
12	Germany	$2.7 billion
13	China	$2.6 billion
14	UAE	$2.2 billion
15	Malaysia	$2 billion
16	Greece	$1.8 billion
17	Thailand	$1.7 billion
18	Spain	$1.7 billion
19	Netherlands	$1.6 billion
20	Italy	$1.4 billion

 

Source: US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,

World Military Expenditure and Arms Transfers, 1997.

 

Note: Figures are estimated value of weapons shipments

based on US government sources.

 

 

Military spending and arms purchases in East Asia were on the rise throughout the mid-1990s, but the financial crisis that broke in July 1997 with the collapse of the Thai currency has slowed acquisition by Korea, Thailand and Indonesia and resulted in the cancellation of several big weapons contracts.

 

Despite the presence of several European and East Asian countries among the leading importers, the Middle East leads all regions of the world in arms imports in the late 1990s. Three major wars in as many decades have bred multiple regional animosities and suspicions, driving up demand, while massive oil wealth and generous military aid programmes have enabled governments to buy large quantities of extremely modern weaponry for their armies, air forces and navies.

 

US, European and other arms manufacturers have competed against each other in all regions of the world, striving, for example, to open new markets in Latin America and eastern Europe. So far these efforts have not paid off, because of the prospective customers’ lack of purchasing power. The competition has been most intense, however, where the money is—the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms. What these cash-paying customers want are the most advanced weapons in the world, and plenty of them. In particular, they want very sophisticated air power and missiles, such as they saw advertised on CNN during the 1991 Gulf War and more recently in Yugoslavia. 

Modern Weapons for Sale 

In the past, for security and arms control reasons, the United States and other suppliers generally exported older, less capable weapons, a generation removed from those fielded by their own forces. Today, they are willing to put on the market top-of-the-line systems previously not for sale, such as American F-15E and Russian Su-30 fighter-bombers, modern European diesel attack submarines, supersonic anti-ship missiles and advanced air-to-air missiles. The existence of a comparable weapon system in another country, whether or not it has been exported, is now routinely used as justification for marketing high-tech weapons.

 

“If we don’t do it (i.e., sell), the French will” has become a favourite rallying cry of the American arms industry and its allies in Congress. High-tech exports are driven principally by domestic economic and political considerations. Their dangers—including an unhealthy diversion of resources, militarisation, the stimulation of arms races and the possible use of exported weaponry in regional or internal conflicts—are overlooked in order to maintain jobs and excess arms-industrial capacity, and to maximise corporate profits. Since the early 1990s, US policy-makers have explicitly, and increasingly routinely, used exports to maintain production lines of sophisticated weapons systems which the US armed forces have finished buying.

 

Successive international battles for aircraft and munitions sales to the Middle East during the 1990s demonstrate this trend well. The first major opportunity of the decade was a lucrative $9 billion sale of a fleet of bombers and munitions to Saudi Arabia negotiated in 1991–2. The principal competitors were McDonnell Douglas, manufacturer of the F-15E Strike Eagle, and the European consortium Panavia, led by British Aerospace, manufacturer of the Tornado. The Saudi regime had sought to buy the F-15E throughout the latter half of the 1980s, but members of Congress consistently blocked the sale because of concerns about Israel’s security. (Saudi Arabia is still technically in a state of war with Israel from the 1973 “Yom Kippur” war.) The jet can deliver twelve tons of bombs to a distance of one thousand miles, and up until this time the United States had not exported it to any nation, including NATO allies. In fact, only two years previously, the US Air Force had rushed the plane into service for the Gulf War, where it was used on hundreds of bombing raids deep into Iraqi territory.

 

But in 1992, with Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait a very recent memory, McDonnell Douglas and the US and Saudi administrations believed—correctly, it turned out—that they could overcome resistance by Israel and its US allies to the deal. To mobilise support and overturn opposition, the manufacturer waged an aggressive and unprecedented “jobs now” campaign. The air force had finished procuring F-15s (although Congress later appropriated a few more to keep the line open), and so McDonnell Douglas devised a national campaign to promote the controversial sale explicitly on the number of jobs it would sustain.⁷ The sale became enmeshed in presidential campaign politics, with then candidate Bill Clinton endorsing the deal while on a campaign stop in St Louis, where the jet is manufactured. Shortly afterwards President Bush announced his support for the sale during a campaign-style rally at the McDonnell Douglas factory and in September of that year Congress approved the export of forty-eight of the bombers to Riyadh.

 

The Saudi planes are slightly less capable than the F-15E jets flown by the US Air Force. They have less ordnance and were not originally slated to carry America’s top-of-the-line air-to-air or ground attack missiles. The aircraft radar also have a lesser resolution. Nevertheless, the sale represented the most sophisticated combat aircraft the United States had ever exported—until a year and a half later, when the Clinton administration and Congress agreed to give Israel twenty-one F-15E bombers with greater capabilities in order to maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge over Saudi Arabia.

 

In the competition for the Israeli sale, which was limited to American suppliers since it was being financed by American military aid grants, Lockheed Martin developed an “enhanced strategic” (ES) version of its popular F-16 Falcon fighter-bomber. This new F-16 model has several improved features over the F-16s flown by the US Air Force. Among these modifications are a reduced radar signature, making the plane more “stealthy” (that is, harder for enemy radar to detect); strap-on fuel tanks, giving the aircraft a combat range of one thousand miles; and extremely advanced internal navigation and targeting gear.

 

Despite these advances, and a significantly lower cost per plane, the F-16 ES failed to clinch the 1993 Israeli fighter deal. But all was not lost. Still pending was the “deal of the century”—a $9 billion aircraft and missile sale to the United Arab Emirates. Considered one of most intense international fighter sales ever, this contest pitted Lockheed Martin’s souped-up F-16 against the Boeing F-15E, the French Rafale and the German-British-Spanish-Italian Eurofighter.

 

Playing on the ability and apparent willingness of the French to supply similar munitions, the UAE demanded that the jets be equipped with more than one hundred of the US Air Force’s most advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles and over one thousand laser-guided bombs. The Clinton administration granted this concession, even though the United States had previously declined to sell this missile to countries in the region on export control grounds.

 

With this concession, it appeared that five years of difficult negotiations had paid off for Lockheed Martin. In May 1998 US Vice-President Al Gore and UAE Crown Prince Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan announced the sale at the White House. Gore then flew to Texas, where the plane is made, to celebrate the good news. The deal was touted as protecting three hundred to five hundred existing jobs in the plant and as perhaps leading to the creation of two thousand more. (Gore, who is running for the presidency, claimed in a White House press release that the deal would mean “up to thirty thousand jobs for American workers”, with close to fifteen thousand in Texas.)

 

But wait: UAE officials came back several months later with another demand. They wanted the “source codes” for the very sophisticated radar in the planes. These codes allow the operator, in this case the UAE Air Force, to change the designation of “friends” and “foes” in the aircraft’s onboard computer, thus allowing the UAE to target US Air Force jets, as well as Israeli, Saudi and other American-supplied allies in the region. The United States has never provided access to this sensitive technology, and the Clinton administration is currently reviewing the issue. The Abu Dhabi government, meanwhile, has remained adamant that, as a cash-paying customer, it wants full control over the aircraft it purchases.

 

Meanwhile, in July 1999 Israel’s new Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced that his country was “buying” fifty F-16 ES fighter-bombers, valued at $2.5 billion. Israel already has more than 250 F-16 jets, the largest fleet of the aircraft outside the United States, and the Israeli Air Force is considered more powerful than that of Italy or Germany. Israel has repeatedly used its US-supplied air force in “pre-emptive” or “defensive” bombing raids in south Lebanon.

 

Through these sales, the United States has dramatically raised the standard of combat aircraft and munitions held by American allies in the region, many of whom enjoy only a “cold peace” with each other. At the same time, large sales of advanced conventional weapons to America’s Middle Eastern allies heighten the sense of threat felt by “unfriendly” governments, in this case Iran and Iraq, spurring them to seek counterbalancing weapons. Such sales by the United States also give the green light to other arms exporters to introduce new levels of military technology into this and other tense regions.

 

By making multi-billion-dollar sales of extremely advanced weaponry to the Middle East, Washington has diminished credibility in pressing other governments to refrain from making sales it views as dangerous. Yet it continually tries to do so, and arms sales have increasingly become a point of contention between erstwhile allies. For example, when Russia sold S-300 air-defence missiles to Cyprus in 1998 the deal faced major US opposition (the missiles were subsequently deployed in Crete). But in 1996 the United States had sold first Turkey and then Greece each over one hundred Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS)—a semi-guided ballistic missile with a range of 30 to 165 km. ATACMS carry an anti-personnel/anti-materiel cluster munition warhead that spews shrapnel over a 150-square-metre area. Given the ongoing counter-insurgency in southern Turkey against Kurdish militants, as well as tension between Greece and Turkey, the rationale for the transfer of these much more offensively oriented weapons must have been difficult for Moscow to grasp. In addition, although neither Syria nor Iran is subject to a UN arms embargo, the United States has protested noisily against any weapons sales to these countries, always painting them as “offensive” and “destabilising”. 

Creating Threats 

A largely unregulated and highly competitive commerce in conventional weaponry exacerbates the principal threats to global security, as articulated by the UN Security Council, the White House, Whitehall and other centres of power. The threats most commonly cited are instability in the developing world (usually engendered by or leading to internal warfare, but also including major regional conflicts) and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons (weapons of mass destruction) and ballistic missiles. These threats are said to justify the continuation of Cold War–level military spending by the US—$270 billion this year.

 

But the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is closely connected to the spread of conventional arms. Bombers, attack helicopters, long-range artillery rockets and other conventional platforms can be used to deliver chemical, biological or nuclear payloads. More fundamentally, conventional arms are part of a continuum that can naturally expand—and on several occasions (Israel, India, Pakistan) has expanded—into weapons of mass destruction. Regimes do not decide to “go nuclear” (or “chemical”) in a vacuum. They do so in the context of conventional arms races, and usually because they perceive an imbalance of conventional military force. (As such, consideration should be given to the impact that tens of billions of dollars worth of high-tech combat equipment, recently sold to the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, might be having on Iranian calculations about potential nuclear weapons plans.) In June 1996, a US presidential advisory board reported that it was

 

strongly convinced that control of conventional arms and technology transfers must become a significantly more important and integral element of US foreign and defence policy if the overall goals of non-proliferation [of weapons of mass destruction] are to succeed.⁸

 

Even leaving aside the link to nuclear and chemical weapons, American defence and intelligence officials now routinely cite the spread of advanced and, on occasion, low-grade conventional weapons as a direct threat to US security. The director of US naval intelligence, Rear Admiral Edward Shaefer, testified to Congress in 1994 that “the overall technical threat and lethality of arms…being exported have never been higher”. And in January 1995, then CIA director R. James Woolsey told a Senate select committee of his agency’s concern over conventional arms proliferation, which he called “a growing military threat, as unprecedented numbers of sophisticated weapons systems are offered for sale on the world market”. 

The Taxpayer’s Burden

Meanwhile, completing the circle, the military services and arms companies in the United States justify development and production of extremely expensive “next-generation” weapons for American forces by citing the arms being acquired by developing nations, including previously exported US systems. In lobbying Congress for production funds for its costly F-22 Stealth Bomber, Lockheed stressed the widespread proliferation of very capable combat aircraft such as the Russian Mig-29 and the American-made F-15 and F-16—the latter of which Lockheed Martin itself now produces.

 

Taxpayers in supplier countries are not only underwriting development of these new weapons, but rising levels of public money are also being expended to help drum up business. Despite their dominance in the market, American arms corporations often claim that European competitors receive a higher level of support from their governments. Alleging an “unlevel playing field”, US industry has sought—and received—many new forms of public assistance to promote and finance weapons exports in the past five years. At the same time, European arms industries are seeking increased assistance to overcome what they see as unfair competition from American industry. The resulting spiral of initiatives—which makes weapons cheaper and easier for customers to purchase—calls into question the alleged economic benefits of arms exports. According to one study, the American public paid out an estimated $7.6 billion to underwrite weapons sales in 1995,⁹ while another says new sales contracts signed that year were only valued at $6.9 billion.¹⁰ 

A Deadly Trade 

The diversion of resources away from social needs in both the developing and developed worlds is tragic enough, but even worse, the weapons trade is directly killing people.

 

There is a long-running political science debate about whether weapons accumulation causes warfare, but it is indisputable that the international weapons trade—in both its licit and illicit dimensions—directly enables and sustains fighting. In all major armed conflicts of the 1990s—Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Liberia—few combatants produced any, let alone all, of their own munitions. Similarly, in the Horn of Africa, Colombia, Turkey, South Asia and the thirty or so wars currently raging, combatants rely on external suppliers for their arms.

 

In particular, it is the abundant trade in cheap small arms and light weaponry, such as automatic rifles and grenade launchers, which sustains these wars. A study of 101 conflicts fought between 1989 and 1996 revealed that small arms and light weapons were generally the weapons of preference or even the only weapons used.¹¹ The low cost, portability and easy use of these weapons mean that they are fielded by combatants of all stripes—state security forces, paramilitaries, insurgents and private security forces, as well as common criminals. As a result, these weapons are believed to be responsible for most combat-related deaths (and many crime-related ones).

 

Worse yet, several factors have contributed in the 1990s to an increasingly and alarmingly high percentage of civilian deaths in armed conflicts. The International Committee of the Red Cross recently estimated (conservatively) that one out of every two people killed in “combat” is a non-combatant—quite often a woman or a child.¹² Prompted by this humanitarian crisis, many non-governmental organisations and governments began pressing in the mid-1990s for more public attention to the devastation wrought by the worldwide sale and distribution of light arms. No good information is currently available on the overall volume of the legal small arms trade, as most states do not report on the sale or purchase of these low-grade items. It is known, however, that newly manufactured guns, grenades and mortars continue to be shipped to the world’s combat zones. 

Standards Needed 

Diplomatic rationales have long been used to justify arms trading, with proponents claiming that sales allow suppliers to gain and maintain “influence” with recipients. In the United States, Congress attempted in the 1970s to exert this leverage by placing several conditions on American weapons exports, including human rights and non-aggression criteria. However, the arms market today is being run like a free market and the global oversupply of weapons means that buyers call the shots. They threaten to turn elsewhere if they dislike the conditions attached to a sale. Consequently, sales proponents pressure their governments to waive all terms that might offend customers. As a result, the vast majority of American-made weapons (in terms of dollar volume) are going to non-democratic, repressive or aggressive governments.¹³

 

Throughout the 1990s the policy of all major exporters seemed to be one of wilfully ignoring the most obvious signs of instability—repression or even aggression—among governments currently considered to be friends or allies. For instance, in the rush to arm Persian Gulf allies, the United States and Europe overlook the fact that massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia have contributed to anti-Western (in particular anti-American) sentiment there, as these sales undermine the Saudi economy and the regime’s ability to maintain subsidies to which Saudi citizens have become accustomed.¹⁴ Similarly, while professing to support movement toward democracy in Bahrain, the US administration has supplied weaponry useful for putting down pro-democracy demonstrations in Manama.

 

Some tentative rules of the road have recently been introduced. In May 1998 the European Union adopted a “code of conduct” on arms exports. This politically binding statement established eight criteria that all fifteen EU states must consider when deciding whether to approve arms exports. Member states agreed not to issue an export licence “if there is a clear risk that the proposed export might be used for internal repression”.

 

In the United States, religious, human rights and disarmament organisations have worked for several years to get a similar law passed. The US “code of conduct” would firmly condition American arms exports on recipients’ adherence to internationally recognised norms of human rights, their participation in the UN Register of Conventional Arms and their embrace of democracy and non-aggression. The central premise of both the American and European efforts is that governments meeting these criteria are more likely to be stable allies, better ensuring that suppliers’ arms do not outlast their current alliances—as they did so spectacularly in the case of Iraq. 

Model Controls 

In recent years a weapon-specific approach has also been used effectively to limit the most dangerous aspects of the arms trade, and this approach might serve as a useful model for further efforts.

 

Currently, two types of conventional weapon are currently subject to widespread export control: ballistic and cruise missiles (above a certain range) and anti-personnel landmines. In the first case, Western governments determined in the late 1980s that the spread of ballistic and cruise missiles directly threatened their own security and that of their allies. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to defend against these unmanned weapons that can travel one thousand kilometres or more in a matter of minutes to deliver up to a ton of lethal payload. Because of their potential use in delivering nuclear or chemical payloads, these weapons were considered to be particularly destabilising and therefore dangerous.

 

As a result, the G7 leading economic powers agreed in 1987 to halt further exports of missiles and components and to seek to encourage other states to do so by creating the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). Previously, states permitted missile exports as routinely and commercially as they permit advanced bomber sales today. Now, however, twenty-nine governments have joined the regime, including practically all missile-producing states, and no government openly transfers ballistic or cruise missiles. If a violation of this norm is suspected, it becomes front-page news, rather than business-page news.

 

Governments removed anti-personnel landmines from the arms market for very different reasons. Spurred on by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the International Committee of the Red Cross, government after government from 1991 began to ban first the export and then the production of anti-personnel mines because of the worldwide toll they were taking of civilians—quite often women and children. Campaigners persuaded world opinion and governments that these weapons were inherently indiscriminate and therefore illegal under international humanitarian law, the body of law that regulates the conduct of warfare and protects non-combatants.

 

In December 1997, 122 governments signed a treaty completely banning the production, stockpiling, transfer and use of anti-personnel landmines. By September 1998, forty states had ratified the treaty, allowing it to enter into force as of 1 March 1999. Subsequently, 42 more governments have ratified the treaty and a total of 135 have signed it.

 

Contrary to what “realist” pessimists say, both cases—missile export controls and the landmine control treaty—demonstrate that effective multilateral export controls are possible once a category of weapon has been singled out and its export effectively stigmatised through government, media and public pressure. These two cases perhaps also demonstrate the utility of targeted campaigns that do not challenge the vested interests of all segments of the arms industry and their allies in militaries and governments at the same time. And they suggest other restraints modelled upon them.

 

For instance, governments continue to produce, export and use several other weapons, which are by nature indiscriminate. Cluster bombs and fragmentation warheads are blanket-area munitions that are inherently indiscriminate. One cluster bomb contains as many as two hundred bomblets, each of which is intended to disperse shrapnel capable of killing or wounding people about 170 metres away, i.e., carpeting an area the size of several football fields. Even those bomblets that do not detonate as intended pose a threat on the ground nearly identical to that of anti-personnel landmines.

 

Allied forces used such weapons extensively in northern Iraq and Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf war. More recently, the United States and Britain dropped more than one thousand cluster bombs on Yugoslavia in 1999, killing dozens of civilians. Several weeks after the end of the air war unexploded ordnance from these weapons continued to take a deadly toll.¹⁵ Human Rights Watch has led international efforts against the use of these weapons, which the organisation maintains are extremely dangerous to civilians whether they explode as intended or drop to the ground.¹⁶

 

Similarly, advanced bombers, other stealthy aircraft, modern air-to-ground munitions, modern diesel attack submarines, anti-ship missiles and naval mines pose a major risk of surprise and devastating attack for countries in the developing world, as well as—potentially—for the forces of the very nation that sold the weapons. Using the model of the MTCR, the major military and economic powers (who are also the major arms suppliers) could and should band together to stigmatise and curb the trade in these and other advanced weapons systems, instead of trying to out-compete each other at any cost.

 

 

Endnotes

 

 

1. US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, 1997, Table II [www.acda.gov/wmeat97/wmeat97.htm].

 

2. At a meeting in Wassenaar, The Netherlands, in December 1995, twenty-eight governments agreed to the formation of a new regime on military exports called “The Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies” [www.wassenaar.org]. According to a US State Department fact sheet, a “central part of the regime is the commitment by its members to prevent the acquisition of armaments … [by] states whose behavior today is, or becomes, a cause for serious concern, such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea”.

 

3. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Fact Sheet: Criteria for Decision Making on US Arms Exports”, 17 February 1995.

 

4. Richard F. Grimmett, “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1990–1997”, CRS Report for Congress (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, July 1998), p. 43.

 

5. Ibid., p. 7.

 

6. Both figures are constant 1996 dollars. US Arms Control Agency, World Military Expenditures, 1997. Table II, entries for Saudi Arabia and Iran.

 

7. For more on this sales campaign, see Arms Sales Monitor, nos. 16 and 17 (Washington, D.C.: Federation of American Scientists, 1992) [www.fas.org/asmp/asm17.html].

 

8. Janne Nolan et al., Report of the Presidential Advisory Board on Arms Proliferation Policy, undated (released in June 1996), p. 2.

 

9. William D. Hartung, Welfare for Weapons Dealers: The Hidden Costs of the Arms Trade (New York: World Policy Institute, 1996).

 

10. Grimmett, “Conventional Arms Transfers”, p. 76. This figure excludes the value of arms sales agreements negotiated directly by the US arms industry in 1995, as such information is not made public.

 

11. P. Wallensteen and M. Sollenberg, “Armed Conflicts, Conflict Termination and Peace Agreements, 1989–1996”, Journal of Peace Research 34, no. 3 (1997).

 

12. On the humanitarian impact of the small arms trade, see International Committee of the Red Cross, Arms Availability and the Situation of Civilians in Armed Conflict (Geneva: ICRC, July 1999).

 

13. See, for example, Dictators or Democracies? Annual Analysis of US Arms Transfers to Developing Countries, 1991–1994 (Washington, D.C.: Project on Demilitarisation and Democracy, August 1995). This study indicates that 85 per cent of US arms exports to developing countries in the 1991–4 period went to unelected governments. See also Human Rights and US Security Assistance (Washington, D.C.: Amnesty International USA, 1996).

 

14. For an assessment of political instability in Saudi Arabia, see Milton Viorst, “The Storm and the Citadel”, Foreign Affairs (January/February 1996).

 

15. Dan Eggen, “NATO ‘Duds’ Keep Killing in Kosovo”, Washington Post, 19 July 1999, sec. A, p. 1.

 

16. Human Rights Watch, Ticking Time Bombs: NATO’s Use of Cluster Munitions in Yugoslavia [www.hrw.org/reports/1999/nato2/nato995.htm].