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Last year alone, agreements with the Third World jumped a whopping 43%. The trade now about equals the world's transfers of food.
The Soviets have spurted upward to challenge the U.S. for the dubious distinction of being the dominant merchant of death. But President Reagan has ended most of the restraints imposed by Jimmy Carter, in the interest of supporting any nation that satisfies his loose definition of a bastion against Communism. No longer are close allies considered the best buyers. The most cultivated customers, both for the Soviets and the Western powers, are developing countries. More than $18.3 billion in major weapons were delivered last year to the Third World— compared with $8 billion in 1975—and contracts were signed for $41 billion in future deliveries. Total economic aid to developing countries by industrialized countries averages around $20 billion a year.
An admixture of wealth, rivalry and instability has made the Middle East a brimming cauldron of the trade, accounting for a third of the world's arms deals. From 1973 to 1980, Middle East and South Asian countries received from the major exporters 4,050 combat planes; 25,250 tanks, self-propelled guns and artillery; 21,680 armored personnel carriers; 26,020 surface-to-air missiles, and countless rifles and machine guns.
A bizarre showcase for all this lethal hardware is the 13-month-old Persian Gulf conflict. Iraq has been using Soviet MiG jets, French Mirage jets, Brazilian Urutu armored personnel carriers, and Soviet T-72 tanks to fight Iran's American F-4 jets, British Chieftain tanks and Italian-built Chinook helicopters. "The Iran-Iraq arms buildup is a classic case of internal pressures and external fears combining to produce a disaster," says a diplomat who has served in both countries.
Alhough the U.S. and the Soviet Union have halted direct shipments to the combatants, the flow of arms to the warring parties seems inexorably controlled by demand.
Egypt has sent to Baghdad, via Jordan, some of the obsolete Soviet weapons that it is replacing with American arms. In the midst of the fighting, France delivered to Iraq four Mirage jets that had been ordered before the war broke out. Iran has turned to North Korea and even Israel in search of spare parts and supplies. Many of the deals have been negotiated by shadowy European middlemen who deal in cash commissions, not moral questions.
Says one who knows the trade: "Things are bound to turn up on the international arms market, including U.S. equipment abandoned in Viet Nam, when countries like Iran are offering cash for American weapons in quantity."
Small arms are a smaller problem. On the outskirts of Tabriz in northern Iran, as in hundreds of similar sites in the Third World, entrepreneurs have set up tent city arms bazaars offering everything from used Soviet and Chinese AK-47s (Soviet model: $150; Chinese copy: $75) to new U.S. Colt .45 automatic pistols ($300), all of which have found their way from armies to the underground.
An even livelier, or perhaps deadlier, trade is in war-torn Lebanon. Says one expert: "There are more