Out of control and no limits in sight
The scene was shocking, but it was an aptly ironic image of the times. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize shot by soldiers—his own—wielding Soviet AK-47s (market price: $750), who had jumped from a Soviet Zil truck (price: $18,000) that was towing a North Korean antitank gun ($35,000). In the background American-made M60 battle tanks ($2 million each) rumbled on in the parade of Egyptian military might, while six French Mirage jet fighters ($2.5 million) flew overhead in tight formation.
Across the Islamic world, from Tripoli to Tehran, the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was celebrated by bursts of bullets from every revolutionary's favorite automatic weapon. More than 10 million AK-47s, designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov, are now in circulation throughout the world.
And in the wake of Sadat's murder, how was tribute paid to the memory of this man? With wreaths of weaponry, offered Sin the name of peace. As a war ing to Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, whose country as a veritable Soviet arsenal, U.S Secretary of State Alexander Haig promised to speed shipments of new bombers and tanks to Egypt. An American, delegation visited the Sudan where Libya's Soviet-supplied jets have been bombing border villages, and promised to try to deliver quickly $100 million worth of military equipment to a jittery President Gaafar Nimeiri. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in Pakistan, where she urged more Western weapons sales to protect that country from a possible attack by Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan. Then she flew in one of Pakistan's Soviet Mi-8 helicopters to the Khyber Pass, where she talked to an Afghan border guard sporting, of course, an AK-47.
There is no question that Egypt and Pakistan all have legitimate security concerns. Yet last week's pronouncements provided further proof of what has long since become an alarming and accelerating commonplace: for large and small nations alike, weapons sales have become the chief tool of diplomacy. "They are now major strands in the warp and woof of world politics," writes Foreign Policy Analyst Andrew Pierre in a forthcoming book, The Global Politics of Arms Sales.
"They are foreign policy writ large." No longer content with surplus materiel from the arsenals of the superpowers, smaller nations are demanding state-of-the-art equipment in everything from fighters to frigates. Even as they deplore the buildup and fear its consequences, the major arms sellers echo the old dirge of 19th century slave traders: "If we don't sell, someone else will." The only effective restraint on the seller, it seems, is the difficulty in beating competitors to the most lucrative contracts.
Not only nations are being armed. Inevitably, weapons flow into the hands of self-proclaimed freedom fighters, terrorists and fanatics and, alas, the children whose legacy it is to be born into a world of arms. One of the 20th century's enduring images may be that of a sad-eyed adolescent cuddling an automatic rifle as if it were a toy.
The world arms bazaar is a Rubik's Cube of complex and shifting relationships and one of the world's largest businesses; last year weapons transfers amounted to perhaps $120 billion.* Weapons are indisputably a growth industry ^ of the '70s