THE ARMS DEALERS: GUNS FOR ALL

In a cafe fronting Rio's Copacabana, a French bureaucrat from Aerospatiale, sipping Campari and soda on the rocks, extols the virtues of the Exocet missile to a cadre of entranced Brazilian admirals. In a Persian Gulf capital, a U.S. military attache prepares a top-secret memo listing the weaknesses of the host country's armed forces. In the lobby of a Zurich hotel, a trader who arranges sales of slightly used rifles and mortars --a "bedroom dealer" in the jargon of the trade--haggles softly with the representative of a Third World guerrilla movement.

All these men participate in what has become the world's fastest-growing business--the arms trade. The contracts they sign in one day could easily exceed a lifetime of sales made by the "merchants of death" of an earlier era, immortalized in Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw's Undershaft, whose credo was "to give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles ... to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes." Consider, for instance, only a few of the transactions announced within the past two weeks:

> Egypt began receiving the first of nearly 50 MIG-23 fighter-bombers it had ordered from the Soviet Union; the Egyptians are also negotiating to buy, for an estimated $264 million, 44 Mirage warplanes from France, and are discussing the purchase of a complete Hawk trainer/strike aircraft factory from the British. Cost: more than $250 million.

> Spain is buying more than $200 million worth of the U.S.'s F-4 Mach 2, long-range Phantom fighter-bombers.

> Ethiopia has urgently requested about $30 million in light arms and ammunition from the U.S. in order to carry on its fight against Eritrean secession ists, who are being supplied by Algeria and Syria with Russian machine guns and antiaircraft missiles.

> Pakistan, hoping that the U.S. will lift its decade-old ban on arms sales to that country, has requested about $50 million in warplanes.

> Kuwait, which is about to buy tanks from Britain, is also purchasing $350 million worth of U.S. A-4 Skyhawk attack fighters, plus one Hawk surface-to-air-missile battalion.

> Iran, by far the world's major arms importer, is buying six fast Spruance-class destroyers from the U.S.'s Litton Industries at a cost of $110 million each.

> The competition between American, French and Swedish airplane manufacturers for sales of a new lightweight jet fighter to NATO members is nearing an end. The winner could reap potential worldwide sales of $15 billion.

The list of nations modernizing their armed forces appears endless. According to a Brookings Institution study, even the Royal Brunei Navy has spent several million dollars upgrading its signal network. The international trade in nonnuclear arms now tops $18 billion annually--up from a mere $300 million in 1952, and a jump of more than 550% since 1964.* Moreover, this represents only a fraction of total military expenditures: in 1973 the nations of the world spent $240 billion to train, equip and maintain their armed forces. Until a few years ago, nations usually exported second-and even third-hand arms. Now some of the newest and most sophisticated aircraft, tanks and missiles are for sale. The MIG-23 going to Egypt and Syria is so advanced that Moscow's Warsaw Pact allies do not even have it yet. The U.S. is allowing the export of the remote-controlled TOW, perhaps the world's deadliest antitank weapon, to Israel, South Viet Nam, Lebanon and Jordan.

The Undershaft spirit rules. When

Pakistanis fought Indians in 1965 and when Turks battled Greeks on Cyprus last summer, both sides used American weapons. Washington's push to peddle arms to several Arab states, as well as supplying Israel, could mean that in a future war, American weapons would probably again be firing at each other.

Both the U.S. and the Soviets, of course, regard their arms exports as a way to keep their allies (and themselves) in military balance. Still, for realists as well as moralists, the situation is ominous. Is it wise or right to sell arms so lavishly to old and new antagonists? On another level, is it right for a world community unable to feed all its people to spend so much wealth on weapons?

Although almost all arms in the West are manufactured by private companies, governments are deeply involved at nearly every step of the high-stakes operation. Pentagon and Commerce Department officials, for example, aid sales teams from U.S. arms manufacturers at the biennial Paris Air Show, where hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons business is transacted. Until recently, France's top arms salesman was Air Force General Hugues de 1'Estoile who, dressed in civilian clothes, trotted the globe seeking customers. Usually, however, it is the military attache, stationed in nearly every embassy around the world, who spots a potential customer and makes preliminary contacts. Having ingratiated himself with senior officers of the host country's armed forces, the attache might gradually convince them that they need a new-model helicopter or a more powerful tank.

The French and British attaches usually come armed with bulging catalogues describing--in Sears, Roebuck fashion--the products manufactured by their nations' defense industries. The limited-distribution, four-volume edition put out by the French, for example, promises that the MILAN antitank missile will provide "unrivalled firing power ... against the ever increasing number of armored vehicles on the battlefield."

The 155-mm. howitzer shell, produced by the Groupement Industriel des Armements Terrestres, is described as having "a better ballistic coefficient" than its American-made counterpart.

Governments aid their arms manufacturers in other ways. Britain has converted an old Liberty-class ship into a floating arms exhibit, which steams into the ports of potential purchasers. France keeps a huge permanent weapons exhibition at Satory, near Versailles. U.S. Army and Air Force bases are constantly visited by foreign delegations interested in seeing weapons demonstrated in simulated combat situations.

Finally, governments facilitate sales by making available the credits required by nearly every customer but the rich oil exporters. Paris has won contracts for French firms by frequently offering longer credit at lower interest than other Western countries. Seldom, however, does anyone underbid the Russians, whose sales decisions take into account neither profit nor public opinion. Moscow, for example, beat France on a sale of MIG fighters to its former protectorate of Morocco. Reason: the Soviets offered 17 years of credit at 3% interest, while the best Paris could do was twelve years at 7%.

Within the supportive framework created by the governments, the sales "reps" of the private firms ply their trade (see box page 43), often checking back at regular intervals with the right government agency for advice. When it is time to close the deal, usually the company's top brass turns up; they are needed to authorize the special (and often costly) changes sometimes requested by the customer which can range from customized upholstery to modifications of the caliber of the weapon.

The U.S. is easily the world's largest arms merchant, with $86 billion in "transfers" since 1950.* America offers, it sometimes seems, a weapon for every need and pocketbook, and keeps developing new products (see SCIENCE page 58). Last year, after processing nearly 14,000 export-license applications from private firms, Washington's Office of Munitions Control approved sales to 136 countries totaling $8.3 billion. (Actual deliveries, of course, lag considerably behind sales.) This represents 46% of total world sales. Included were rifles and mortars to Guatemala and Paraguay, supersonic jet fighters to West Germany and Brazil, Sidewinder air-to-air missiles to Italy and South Korea, armored personnel carriers to Jordan and Norway, heavy-duty CH-47 (Chinook) helicopters to Iran, Spain and South Viet Nam, destroyers to Chile, counterinsurgency equipment to the Philippines and C-130 Hercules air transports to Sweden and Zaire.

The Soviet Union is second in the international arms game ($39 billion since 1950, $5.5 billion in 1974).

Only the Soviets exported more supersonic aircraft last year than the U.S. did (400, v. 325); no country transferred more helicopters (100) and tanks (1,177) than the Americans.

The pattern of the arms trade has changed. Until recently, more than 70% of Washington's arms exports went to nations bordering on the Soviet Union, its allies and China (the so-called forward defense areas). NATO members, South Korea, Indochina and Taiwan are still major purchasers, but the U.S. now finds its biggest customers in the Middle East--first Iran and then Israel. Since the 1973 war, Israel has obtained more than $2 billion in supersonic fighter-bombers, tanks, bombs, anti-missile defenses for warplanes and thousands of tons of ammunition. Washington shipped so much weaponry to Israel that the National Guard and Reserves are still short of tanks even though the Chrysler assembly line is now turning out five tanks daily compared to one per day before the Yom Kippur War. For 1975 Jerusalem has already indicated that it needs an additional $2.5 billion in arms. Saudi Arabia's recent purchase of 60 easy-to-operate, Mach 1.6 Northrop F-5 "Tiger 2" fighter-bombers, at a cost of $756 million, has thrust it into third place as an American customer, ahead of Greece, West Germany, Spain, Canada and Taiwan.

The Middle East is also Moscow's major customer, accounting last year for 45% of the Kremlin's arms exports. In their past three wars with Israel, the Arabs have relied almost exclusively on Russian-made T-tank series, assorted MIG fighter-bombers and the deadly accurate SAM antiaircraft missiles. In addition, the Kremlin for decades has shipped massive quantities of war materiel to the Warsaw Pact states and to the armies of North Korea and North Viet Nam. Dozens of other Third World countries admire Soviet weapons: MIGS, AK-47 automatic rifles (widely regarded as the world's best combat rifle) and armored cars are highly prized.

Soviet weapons exports are completely run by the government, since all industry is state-owned. Moscow's Chief Engineering Directorate currently handles all arms negotiations, sales, shipments and transfer agreements. Customers have been delighted to find that not only do the Soviets offer cheap credit, but they also sell at cut-rate prices. Moscow recently offered to sell some MIG-21s to Peru at one-third of what the comparable American-made F-5 would cost ($2 million). There is one hitch, however, in buying from the Russians: as Egypt has learned, it is sometimes very difficult to get Soviet spare parts.

For years both France and Britain have been vying for third place as weapons purveyors, concentrating on the same markets--the Middle East, Latin America and their former African colonies. Last year the French clearly pulled ahead of the British, selling $3 billion in war materiel to some 80 nations, ranging from submarines for the navies of Spain, Portugal, Pakistan and South Africa to daggers for Tunisian commando units. The best-selling French items: various models of the Mirage supersonic fighters, the agile and swift AMX tanks, Alouette helicopters and radar-guided Exocet antiship missiles.

Britain today has neither the built-in markets of the Commonwealth nor the vast used-weapon surplus that in the years after World War II made London the West's No. 2 arms exporter. Nor are the British as aggressive as their Continental rivals. "Britain has darn few salesmen," complains one English arms expert. "There's a lack of push among recent efforts, and morale is terrible." Nonetheless, Britain last year sold an impressive $1.5 billion in arms, accounting for about 8% of world transfers. Frigates, submarines and fast patrol boats went to Latin America. Iran bought more than 1,000 Chieftain and 300 Scorpion tanks. Black Africa, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have shown considerable interest in the Scorpion, a light aluminum tank with great mobility.

Besides the Big Four, several other states have found profitable niches in the world arms market:

-- Italy's arms exports, totaling $240 million last year, include helicopters for Iran (built under license from the U.S.), frigates for Peru, tanks for Pakistan and counterinsurgency aircraft for Zambia and South Africa. James Bond's favorite pistol, the snub-nosed .25-mm. Beretta, is still sold all over the world. La Spezia's Oto Melara company has tested a high-speed missile-launching hydrofoil designed to protect narrow bodies of water. Italian arms appeal to nonaligned nations since Rome attaches no political strings to sales.

> West Germany was prohibited from manufacturing weapons until 1955 and officially professes not to be a participant in the international arms business. Nevertheless, it boasts one of Europe's biggest armaments industries, with exports usually exceeding $ 100 million. The Howaldswerke Deutsche Werft's Kiel shipyards produce "special ships" (read: submarines) for Latin America, while the state-owned Fritz Werner corporation exports entire ready-to-roll munitions factories. Bonn's Leopard tank is highly regarded: Washington may test an advanced Leopard, along with prototypes by General Motors and Chrysler, in a competition to select the U.S. Army's main battle tank for the 1980s.

> Sweden and Switzerland, to avoid jeopardizing their neutrality, ban arms sales to nations engaged in war or to areas "ridden by tension." Nonetheless, together they export about $75 million in arms annually. The Swedes specialize in sophisticated electronic equipment and fighter planes; Saab's Draken is flown by the Danish and Finnish air forces, and the firm hopes to find NATO customers for its new Mach 2 Viggen. Switzerland's specialties are antiaircraft weapons, which it has sold in quantities to West Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands.

> Canada, with about $100 million in annual exports, is also an important arms merchant. Most of its sales, however, are of U.S.-designed weapons (i.e., military transport and fighter planes), which are shipped to either the U.S. or other NATO states.

-- Israel uses virtually all of its defense production for its own armed forces. Last year, though, the country earned at least $50 million in badly needed foreign currency by selling abroad some weapons of its own design: the Uzi submachine gun (more than 300,000 have been sold to 50 foreign customers, including the U.S. Secret Service, in the past two decades), the Arava, a short-takeoff and -landing warplane that is being bought by Mexico and Nicaragua and the Gabriel ship-to-ship missile, whose performance in the October War against Egypt's Russian-made patrol boats impressed the U.S. Navy.

Communist nations closely guard their export figures, but Pentagon experts believe that China supplies some weapons (such as MIG-21 fighter-bombers, with instrument panels and operating manuals in Chinese) to North Viet Nam, North Korea, Pakistan and a few revolutionary movements in Africa. Poland is a major outlet for the Warsaw Pact's surplus tanks. Czechoslovakia, whose famed Bren gun as well as the Skoda Works' howitzers made the country second only to Britain as a weapons merchant in the 1930s, has dropped from the big leagues. It sells some jet trainers to other Communist states and Syria, and mortars to Cuba; normally, however, Prague serves as a front for Moscow in politically sensitive transfers like the 1955 arms sale to Egypt--the first Communist penetration into the Middle East.

Some major arms importers are exporting as well. India, for example, sells rifles to Tanzania, while Jordan recently exported aging British-made tanks to South Africa (which were quaintly listed on the shipping manifests as "earthmoving tractors"). Argentina has been developing its defense industry during the past decade by manufacturing arms under license; for example, it has built more than 100 of the French AMX-13 tanks. The Argentines are currently trying to interest South Africa and Bolivia in the Pucara, an Argentine-designed counterinsurgency plane made with French, British, Swiss and Belgian components.

In the next decade, the ranks of the exporters will undoubtedly increase, as the capacity of local armaments-manufacturing industries expands. The world's arms supply will swell even more, as thousands of tanks and aircraft become surplus when NATO and the Warsaw Pact introduce a new generation of weapons for their forces. Even South Viet Nam has reportedly begun to dispose of weapons that were left behind by the American troops.

If the patterns of the past decade continue, most of the increased sales of arms will be to the underdeveloped nations of the Third World. According to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, developed and underdeveloped countries in 1964 each imported about $1.5 billion in arms; by 1973 the industrialized states were actually buying a bit less, while the Third World countries' import bill had soared to $7.7 billion. One reason: as East-West tension has ebbed in Central Europe, the areas of real and potential conflict have shifted to the Third World. Enormous quantities of arms were required by the fighting in Korea, Indochina and the Middle East, as well as Black Africa. After the wars of 1967 and 1973, both the Arabs and Israelis needed massive resupplies of warplanes, armor, missiles and electronic equipment. In the 1973 war alone, 600 warplanes and 2,700 tanks were destroyed and had to be replaced.

Sales of arms to the Third World have also grown simply because there are more customers than ever before. Since World War II, the creation of 75 new nations has meant the formation of a comparable number of new armies. Because military elites often play major roles in the early stages of the new states, their demands for more equipment can seldom be ignored. "No military branch wants to be saddled with old or obsolete equipment that reflects adversely on the dignity of the service," dryly notes a 1973 Rand Corp. study on the transfer of arms to Latin America.

Leaders of young nations often feel that their prestige is determined by the number of shiny new weapons that rumble past the reviewing stand during a military parade. Moreover, disputed borders and the suspicion of seemingly hostile neighbors frequently lead to intense local arms races. This has been the case with India and Pakistan, Mali and Upper Volta, and Peru, Bolivia and Chile.

Such competition can be costly. Naive, unsophisticated military men have often purchased equipment ill-suited to their nations' needs. "The arsenals of many developing nations," notes General J.N. Chaudhuri, former chief of staff of India's army, "have tanks too heavy for the local bridges, aircraft without enough pilots and warships that cannot put out to sea."

Inevitably, arms exports are an instrument of foreign policy. In the years immediately following World War II, arms-exporting states carefully weighed --and often rejected--offers from foreign customers. The U.S. has exported weapons in order to bolster anti-Communist regimes; a congressional act of 1951 explicitly forbade sales to neutral nations and insisted that purchasing countries contribute to "the defensive strength of the free world." To the Soviets, arms sales to the Middle East have been a means of challenging Western influence. By transferring arms to India, the Russians sought to create a regional counterforce to Peking.

Both Moscow and Washington have sometimes made arms transfers dependent upon acquisition of foreign outposts. The Soviet air force, for example, now enjoys base facilities in Yemen and Somalia, which it has supplied heavily with military hardware. American base rights in Spain and Thailand have been a quid pro quo for weapons. Using arms sales to gain bases, however, sometimes makes the exporting country a hostage of the recipient. Ankara now threatens to expel the U.S. from some of its vital bases in Turkey because Congress stopped deliveries of military aid.

Foreign policy and strategy aside, for many nations arms exports have been a useful means of keeping their defense industries alive. The increased volume provided by sales abroad improves production efficiency and helps amortize research and development costs. Without its large export market, for instance, France's Dassault-Breguet aircraft company would probably be unable to produce Mirages at a price that the French air force could afford.

Sweden believes that it can safeguard its neutrality only by producing its own air-defense weapons. The cost of manufacturing the Draken or Viggen fighter-bombers, however, would have been prohibitive without foreign sales. Thanks to rising costs of raw materials, even U.S. manufacturers are beginning to require foreign sales to make their products cost-effective (Iran's purchase of 80 F-14s from Grumman saved that company from insolvency).

The rapid rise in petroleum prices has had a double impact on the arms trade. First, the oil-exporting countries have reaped mountains of cash that allows them to procure almost any weapon they desire for themselves or for their allies and clients. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, for example, have bankrolled costly arms purchases by Syria, Egypt and Jordan. Second, Western industrial nations are finding that arms transfers are a major help in balancing the payments deficits incurred by the high cost of imported oil. Indeed, a jet fighter can earn as much foreign currency as the sale of 1,000 autos.

Nowhere is the boom in arms sales more apparent than in the Persian Gulf. "There is very little on the outer reaches of military technology that is not coming into this area," notes a Western diplomat in Tehran. With oil profits exceeding $56 billion last year, the nations of the Gulf have plunged into what may well become the most expensive and competitive arms race in history. In the past two years, Iran has gone on such an arms-buying spree that it has spent $7.6 billion in the U.S. alone acquiring one of the world's most modern arsenals. The Shah's air force will soon add the Grumman F-14 Tomcat Mach 2.3 fighter to its fleet of 60 F-5s and 200 F-4 Phantoms (with another 200 ordered), not to mention eight tankers for inflight refueling.

Iran's army boasts about 3,000 armored vehicles and has more than 1,000 helicopters, including the American-made SeaCobra attack chopper, which even the U.S. Army does not have. What is probably the world's biggest helicopter-training facility has been constructed at Isfahan in central Iran. It is staffed by U.S. experts who, with their families, form a colony of 5,000. The Shah's navy includes nearly 40 destroyers, frigates and Hovercraft--some armed with missiles. Iran is now so important a customer for American arms that the head of the U.S. military mission in Tehran, Air Force Major General Devol ("Rock") Brett, has direct access to the Shah.

In the view of some military experts, Iran has far more arms than it needs to protect its borders, a fact that worries other Gulf nations. In defense of the buildup, Iranian military officials argue that their country has potentially antagonistic neighbors in the Soviet Union and Iraq and that the country has a particular responsibility to defend and keep open the narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which pass tankers carrying more than half of the West's oil supply.

Nonetheless, other Gulf states have responded by undertaking weapons-expansion programs. Iraq has already received MIG fighters, heavy artillery and the Scud surface-to-surface missiles, which can be fitted with nuclear warheads, from the Soviets; in addition to the American A-4 Skyhawks, Kuwait is ordering Mirages from France; even tiny Abu Dhabi, a member sheikdom of the United Arab Emirates, has obtained C-130 transports and Mirages.

Saudi Arabia, whose oil lifeline also runs through the Gulf, has likewise turned to the U.S. for arms and found some sympathetic ears. The Pentagon has advised the Saudis that they should substantially expand their armed forces over the next decade by adding a mechanized brigade, at least one tank battalion, an air force wing, attack helicopters and coastal-defense vessels. "I do not know of anything non-nuclear that we would not provide the Saudis," says a U.S. military official in Jeddah. "We want to sell, and they want to buy."

Pentagon officials joke that "the Persian Gulf will sink under all the arms that it is buying." There are growing fears, however, that this amassing of aims in the Gulf area could trigger an accidental war. The Arab-Israeli conflict aside, there are bitter rivalries between the neighboring states and sheikdoms. Aryan Iran, even though it is a Moslem country, has never been fully trusted by its Semitic Arab neighbors. Experts do not rule out a future conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Tehran's support of the Kurdish rebellion against Baghdad, as well as longstanding frontier disputes, has already led to skirmishing on the Iran-Iraq border. New Delhi, meanwhile, grows progressively more uncomfortable as it watches Iran's military muscle edge toward the Indian Ocean, fearing that Tehran one day will ally itself with Pakistan, a fellow Moslem state, against India.

Latin America is also enmeshed in an arms buildup. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela are sufficiently prosperous to modernize their arsenals. They have purchased frigates and submarines from West Germany and Britain, Mirage fighter-bombers and howitzers from France and jet trainers from Italy. Peru last year startled its neighbors and Washington by turning to Moscow for arms costing about $85 million--some 600 T-54 and T-55 tanks, plus artillery and antiaircraft guns and missiles.

The U.S. has ranked behind other members of the Big Four as a supplier of major arms to South America. For years Washington argued--no doubt correctly--that Latin nations would be diverting funds from urgent social projects if they wasted money on modern armaments. Using its dominant position in the hemisphere, the U.S. limited purchases by the Latins to World War II-vintage weaponry. By the mid-1960s, the larger Latin American countries were chafing under this de facto arms embargo. In 1968 Peru triggered what became a continentwide buying spree when it obtained Mirages from France; these were the first supersonic warplanes in Latin America, except for Cuba's Soviet-supplied MIGs. For the next five years, the European arms salesmen shuttling across the Atlantic to woo South American customers were virtually unchallenged by U.S. competition. In 1973, after Europe had already sold more than $2 billion in war materiel to Latin America, the Nixon Administration gave in to the pleas of U.S. defense industrialists and ended the embargo.

Thanks to this arms race, tension has already begun building on the Peru-Chile border. Lima's military strongmen are believed to want to retake the Ta-rapaca province which Peru lost to Chile during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). Peru has its new Soviet-made equipment; Santiago, meanwhile, is receiving more than $500 million in warplanes, tanks and ships purchased in the past 18 months from the U.S. and Europe. Fearing that it will be caught in the middle if war erupts, Bolivia has decided that it must modernize its weaponry to protect itself, even though the country can ill afford it.

Can anything be done to stop this vast and insane flow of weapons? Only a few attempts at arms control have succeeded. The Antarctic is a "weapons-free zone," and NATO and Japan for the past quarter-century have voluntarily refrained from exporting strategic goods to Communist-bloc nations. The U.S. imposes elaborate restrictions on the sale of the shoulder-fired Redeye anti aircraft missile because it could be disastrous if the easy-to-use weapon fell into the hands of terrorists, who could then fire it at civilian airliners.

Too often, however, self-restraint has failed. The Tripartite Declaration of 1950, in which the U.S., France and Britain pledged to limit the flow of weapons into the Middle East, broke down four years later when the French agreed to supply Israel with tanks and planes. Even the tvso superpowers, for all the months of negotiating at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, have not been able to ban anything but the anti-ballistic missile, the effectiveness of which was seriously doubted anyway.

The "end-use clause"--a promise by the purchaser not to sell weapons to a third party without permission of the original exporting state--has had only limited success. Washington has been unable to prevent Pakistan from using American-supplied arms against India, even though the original transfer agreement with Islamabad specifically forbade it. The end-use clause obviously did not prevent Libya from loaning its French-made Mirages to Egypt for use against Israel.

The 1971 coup in Uganda involved a classic case of arms bouncing from country to country. The five Sherman tanks used by General Idi Amin Dada in the army revolt against President Milton Obote were originally sent by Washington to the Soviets under the World War II Lend-Lease Act. Moscow later transferred them to the Egyptians, from whom they were captured by the Israelis in 1967. Israel overhauled the tanks and then delivered them to Uganda as part of an aid program.

Embargoes have seldom proved much of a barrier to the arms trade. Paris has readily ignored them, selling weapons to South Africa, Pakistan, India and Latin America when no other major exporter would. In the 1960s the U.S. tried to cool tensions in South Asia by restricting its arms sales to the region. India, which until then had been using American weapons, merely turned to the Soviet Union for supplies; Pakistan looked to China and France.

In theory, it would seem that developing nations ought to welcome some measures to brake local arms races, thereby freeing money for social and economic development. For example, impoverished India has doled out $3 billion to the Soviet Union for arms in the past three years; Pakistan, scrimping to find $250 million for a new fertilizer factory, spends at least that much on weapons annually. Yet the Third World countries reject any ban on arms transfers, arguing that it would put small states, which cannot manufacture their own weapons, at the mercy of the nations with greater industrial capacity.

The weapons-producing states also oppose controls. The Soviet Union and the U.S. are not about to give up the most efficient way they can exert power and influence. For all industrial states, weapons sales, like any other exports, mean jobs. Thus when Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was criticized in 1969 for selling arms to the U.S. that were eventually used in Viet Nam, he defended himself by pleading that it was a choice between "dirty hands and empty bellies."

The economics of arms sales may even transcend bitter hatreds. One California communications-equipment dealer, for example, recently received a sizable order from the Syrian armed forces for some militarily useful items. He scribbled "F you!" across the order form and returned it to the Syrian embassy in Washington. A few days later, a puzzled military attache called the dealer, inquiring why he had so brusquely refused the order. "I'm Jewish," explained the Californian. "What's that got to do with it?" asked the Arab. "This is business."

It has sometimes been argued that there is no direct equation between an arms buildup and war. Until recently, the area importing the most arms was neither the Middle East nor Indochina, but the industrial nations of Western Europe--and they have been at peace for nearly three decades. It is also true that brutal combat does not require advanced weapons: the horrors of Europe's Thirty Years War of the 17th century, the U.S. Civil War and World War I testify to that.

Nonetheless, common sense argues that the arms trade can scarcely advance peace. In each of the 60 military conflicts since the end of World War II, imported weapons were used almost exclusively. According to Arms Expert Anne Messing Cahn, former research associate at M.I.T.'s Center for International Studies, "those arms have brought not only violence and destruction but death to more than 10 million people."

So far the trade in arms has been limited to conventional weapons, but that too may change. Denouncing the "monstrous logic" of his country's policy of exporting nearly any weapon to nearly any nation, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, publisher of L'Express and head of France's Radical Party, fears that the day is fast approaching when Paris will sell atomic arms. The U.S. has provided half a dozen nations with planes or missiles capable of delivering a nuclear punch, as have the Soviets.

Voicing the frustration of many who fear the results of the spiraling arms trade, Peruvian Foreign Minister Miguel de la Flor Valle (whose nation has helped trigger the current Latin American weapons buildup) demands: "Let the industrial nations stop their indecent competition in the sale of arms to the Third World nations!" Dr. Dale Tahtinen, assistant director of foreign-and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, agrees. "If countries were left to themselves," says Tahtinen, "they would mostly buy only what they need as they perceive it ... the cheap stuff and not the flashy weapons."

Even pragmatic considerations could argue against the current world arms-buying binge. U.C.L.A. Political Scientist Roman Kolkowicz warns that "it is very dangerous to move substantial quantities of fairly sophisticated weapons into the hands of unstable political-military elites, whose ability to restrain their fantasies and appetites is weak at best."

Indeed, today's favored arms customer may become tomorrow's Frankenstein monster. Governments can change abruptly; a coup in Iran or Saudi Arabia might bring to power a regime as radical as that of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The new leader would inherit a cache of the latest military hardware, which he would almost surely use against the interest of the Western states that originally provided it. Just as odd is the U.S.'s massive arming of Persian Gulf states, at the very moment when it is hinting that military intervention might be necessary if the West faced economic strangulation. True, the possibility of such intervention is remote and is heavily outweighed by the opportunity of bolstering Saudi Arabia's pro-Washington regime by supplying it with U.S. arms.

Yet there are few foreign affairs experts who are willing to advocate a ban on arms sales, so long as what Senator Stuart Symington calls "the rules of the game" remain unchanged. It may well be that the arms trade is, in fact, necessary to the existence of sovereign states. Who can say that they should not retain the option of military force to protect themselves? Welko Gasich, a vice president of Northrop Aircraft Corp., puts it bluntly: "Until we have a bona fide world police force, it's still Dodge City and everyone wants a rifle over his door." Considering the rate at which arms are being exported, the day of a rifle for every door may not be too far away.

* A11 figures reckoned in current dollars, unadjusted for inflation. * Experts use the euphemistic, though accurate, term transfers to include not only arms sold but also those provided as aid.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.