Arming the World

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buy them. Although rich in oil, the country's defense forces are considered toothless. President Shehu Alhaji Shagari reluctantly refrained from intervening when Libya invaded Chad last year, in part because he thought his men would be overpowered. Nigeria is now in the market for $6 billion worth of tanks, fighter planes, antitank weapons and antiaircraft guns, and has begun negotiating with Brazil for the technology to build its own automatic-rifle factory. Britain is trying to sell Nigeria its newest Vickers battle tank, which has already been supplied to Kenya.

Southeast Asia is tangled in a web of official and black market arms dealings. In the past year Thailand has bought 15 F-15 fighter jets, 35 tanks, three military transport planes and 59 howitzers. Last year's deliveries from the U.S.: $222 million. The Thais are also in the market for advanced fighter jets, either the new F-5G, designed by Northrop Corp. solely for export, or the more powerful F16. The Thais serve as a conduit for Chinese and other arms sent to the Khmer forces fighting in Cambodia against the Vietnamese. Hanoi, for its part, has been able to unload on the world market many weapons that the U.S. left behind in withdrawing from Viet Nam. Almost 800,000 M-16 rifles are still in Vietnamese hands.

Need often seems to have nothing to do with arms acquisitions. In the past two or three years, Zambia has bought $100 million worth of Soviet jet fighters and tanks with money that would have been better spent on reviving its copper industry. Colombia imported French Mirage jets and Israeli military transports. Peru has bought 18 jet trainers from the U.S., plus 16 fighter-bombers and 250 tanks from the Soviet Union, three destroyers from The Netherlands, 192 missiles from Italy, four submarines from West Germany and 48 naval missiles from France. Average annual purchases: $3 billion. Tiny Brunei (pop. 212,000), an oil-producing British protectorate on the north coast of Borneo, has bought eleven helicopters from the U.S., six more from West Germany and a set of Sabre and Rapier missiles from Britain.

The infamous "merchants of death," who sold their wares to all sides of conflicts during the early years of the 20th century, were private entrepreneurs such as Sir Basil Zaharoff of England and the Krupps of Germany. But by World War II, governments had emerged as the principal suppliers. Until recently the major powers relied more on economic and developmental aid in their attempts to influence other countries. Only in the late '60s did weapons sales become the major tool of diplomacy that they are today.

The U.S. has long been, and by some measures still is, the world's largest arms merchant. More than $17 billion in official Government sales and private commercial deals* involving 72 countries was recorded last year, up from $1.8 billion ten years ago. Over the past decade, the U.S.

supplied 45% of all the major weapons sold to the Third World. Under Richard Nixon, Washington's policy was aimed at arming strategic allies that could serve as regional protectors of American interests.

A prime example: Iran, which was sent $10 billion worth of weapons before the fall of the Shah. Jimmy Carter tried to reverse course and use arms sales only as an "exceptional foreign policy implement," arguing that "the virtually unrestrained spread of